Trivia: American leading man Craig Sheffer was first seen on a nationwide basis on the TV-serial circuit. He played Ian Hayden on the ABC daytime drama One Life to Live, and was cast as the teenaged son of Michael Goodwin and Leigh-Taylor Young on the 1983 prime time serial The Hamptons. Sheffer's earliest starring assignment in films was as the best friend of troubled teenager Emilio Estevez in That Was Then...This Is Now (1985). Among Craig Sheffer's more recent films are A River Runs Through It (1992) (in which he played the older brother of Brad Pitt), Fire in the Sky (1993), and Sleep With Me (1994) (top-billed, as the apex of a romantic triangle which included Eric Stoltz and Meg Tilly). He remained a steadily-working actor, often in indie films. His credits include A Season in Purgatory, Flypaper, and Miss Evers' Boys. In the 21st century he could be seen in Maze, Deep Core, and Killer Buzz before landing the role of Keith Scott on the television series One Tree Hill. In 2007 Sheffer wrote and directed the ensemble comedy American Crude. He starred in the 2008 thriller While She Was Out, and in 2012 he was the lead in Clive Barker's Nightbreed: The Cabal Cut.

Trivia: Like Tobe Hooper and George Romero, David Cronenberg sprang into public consciousness with a series of low-budget horror films that shocked and surprised audiences for their sheer audacity and intelligence. Unlike the former two filmmakers, Cronenberg has been able to avoid being pigeonholed into a single restrictive genre category. His works, which consistently explore the same themes, have the mark of a true auteur in the strictest sense of the word. Cronenberg's films have the unnerving ability to delve into society's collective unconscious and dredge up all of the perverse, suppressed desires of modern life. His world features grotesque deformities, hallucinatory couplings, and carnality unhinged from its corporeal moorings.Born on March 15, 1943, in Toronto, Canada, Cronenberg was the son of a freelance journalist and a piano teacher. He was raised in a nurturing middle class family and wrote constantly as a child, showing a strong interest in science, particularly in botany and lepidopterology (the study of moths). In 1963, he entered the University of Toronto as an Honors Science student, though he quickly grew disenchanted and within a year switched to the Honors English Language and Literature program. During this time, Cronenberg was profoundly impressed by Winter Kept Us Warm (1966) by classmate David Secter. Though previously not especially interested in film, this student work piqued his interest, and soon he was hanging out at film camera rental houses where he taught himself the ins and outs of filmmaking. He made two no-budget 16mm films (Transfer and From the Drain), and -- inspired by the underground film scene in New York -- he founded the Toronto Film Co-op with Iain Ewing and Ivan Reitman. After a year traveling in Europe, Cronenberg returned to Canada and graduated at the top of his class in 1967.After making the avant-garde sci-fi flick Stereo (1969), Cronenberg became one of the first recipients of CFDC (Canadian Film Development Corporation) funding for his follow-up, Crimes of the Future (also 1969), a dark, surreal experimental exploration of sexuality. After these two films, Cronenberg realized that working in a strictly experimental venue was ultimately a dead end -- he wanted to broaden his audience.With Reitman as the producer, Cronenberg made his feature debut with the low-budget horror flick Shivers (1975). Recalling Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Shivers gleefully presents the audience with phallus-like parasites that turn an apartment full of well-to-do professionals into a throng of sex-mad maniacs. Shivers sharply divided critics. Cronenberg made two more films with direct or indirect funding from the CFDC -- Rabid (1977) and The Brood (1979). Both of these films, along with Shivers, form a rough trilogy of sorts about physical evolutions of the body bringing civilization to its knees. In Rabid, featuring Ivory Pure model-turned-porn star Marilyn Chambers as Typhoid Mary, a virulent strain of rabies that reduces victims to foaming murderous animals devastates the city of Montreal. In The Brood, a mother manifests her angers as bloodthirsty, hideously misshapen children.Cronenberg's breakthrough film was his 1981 box office hit Scanners. Featuring an overtly sci-fi story line, a sinister performance by Michael Ironside, and an infamous exploding head scene, the film established Cronenberg's name beyond the exploitation house and drive-in audiences. Two years later, Cronenberg followed this up with his masterful Videodrome. Told in a Burroughs-esque fractured stream of consciousness, the film concerns Renn, a sleazy cable TV operator, who discovers that the mysterious snuff cable he happened upon gives the viewers brain tumors. Humans and media hardware merge in unexpected, strangely sexual ways: video tapes throb like organs, and a tape is slotted into a vagina like gash in a human abdomen. Though Videodrome's awe of video may seem dated, the film's basic questioning of technology seems perhaps more relevant today than it did when it first premiered. After mining his own personal nightmare, Cronenberg opted for comparatively lighter fare and directed The Dead Zone (1983), adapted from a Stephan King novel. Though this was the first and thus far only script that he did not have a hand in writing, the film's emphasis on off-kilter psychologies and disease bears Cronenberg's unmistakable stamp. Eventually, Cronenberg agreed to remake the 1958 horror classic The Fly (1986). Both a wild gore-fest and a brilliant metaphor for aging, Cronenberg's Fly is a more harrowing and emotionally powerful work than the original. The film also recalled the intensity and intimacy of his early horror works such as The Brood. Consisting of only three main characters and basically one setting, the film obsessively depicts the lead character's slow and gruesome mutation, complete with dropped-off body parts, into a human-fly hybrid. The film proved to a terrific critical and financial success. With his directing reputation cemented, Cronenberg edged away from horror/sci-fi genres and made the chilling character study Dead Ringers (1988). Based on a National Enquirer headline about the real-life case of the Marcus brothers, a pair of fratricidal identical twin gynecologists, the film clinically portrays the duo as their identities slowly disintegrate and merge.Cronenberg followed up Dead Ringers with the decidedly less commercial Naked Lunch (1991). Less an adaptation of William S. Burroughs' classic underground novel than a dizzying meditation on the act of writing, the film features some of Cronenberg's most striking images articulating some of his most familiar themes. Talking cockroaches morph into typewriter-like organisms, women suddenly split open and become men, and typewriters possess flesh-like qualities and evolve into undefined sexual organs. His next work, M. Butterfly (1993), is a restrained account of the bizarre true life case of Rene Gallimard, a French embassy worker who never realized that his long-time Chinese lover was in fact a man.Cronenberg followed M. Butterfly with Crash (1996), his most controversial work to date, based on the profoundly disturbing underground classic by J. D. Ballard. Banned for a time in Britain and rated NC-17 in the U.S., the film is a hypnotic, harrowing journey through a landscape of aberrant sexuality, sterile modernist architecture, emotional blankness, and smashed automobiles. Just as in Ballard's work, Cronenberg takes the familiar cliches of romance and seduction and supplants them with something alien and surreal. James Ballard, the protagonist, engages in an adulterous affair not after a chance meeting, but after a car wreck. The same character penetrates the wound in a severely injured woman's leg instead of using more traditional orifices. Daring and frightening, Crash won a Special Jury Prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival.For his 1999 film eXistenZ, he wrote his first original script since Videodrome. Inspired by the fugitive life of author Salman Rushdie, whom Cronenberg interviewed for a magazine, the film concerns a game's designer on the run from a band of Luddite terrorists. Cronenberg brilliantly reverses all Blade Runner-like cliches of the coming cyberpunk future by setting the film in a rustic mountain forest where old fish canneries serve as biotech factories. Fans who were left thirsting for more following the innovative cyberpunk exploits of eXistenZ faced an extended dry spell in the following three years, left with little more than an introspective and fascinating six-minute short entitled Camera that proved a study in celluliods relationship with ageing and death. Though his involvement with the planned sequel to Basic Instinct may not quite have been the film fans had hoped for, plans quickly fell through and Cronenberg began to express interest in author Patrick McGrath's book Spider. A haunting study in mental decay, the material seemed ideally suited to Cronenberg's dark outlook, and it wasn't long before McGrath was adapting his novel into a screenplay for the eager director. Recieving generally high marks from critics upon its limited stateside release in early 2003, the film nevertheless proved a hard sell due to its brooding and deliberate pacing.In the years that followed, Cronenberg moved into genres he hadn't yet charted - with tremendous critical and commercial success across the board. This exploration began in 2005 with A History of Violence - a tough crime thriller with Viggo Mortensen as a man living an unassuming life in Central Indiana, whose dark criminal past explosively catches up with him. Two years later, Cronenberg and Mortensen reunited for the arthouse hit Eastern Promises (2007), with Mortensen as a Russian mafia kingpin living and operating in London; it received glowing reviews and earned considerable box office. Then, in 2011, Cronenberg emerged with a picture in yet another genre: historical drama. His A Dangerous Method co-starred Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley in the tale of psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein and her complex relationships with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. In 2012 he adapted Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis, casting Robert Pattinson as a wealthy young New Yorker having a very hard time getting across town.

Trivia: After a goodly number of stage appearances, Charles Haid made his TV-movie bow in 1974's The Execution of Private Slovik. A year later, he was cast in his first weekly-series role, playing the priest/attorney brother of lawyer Anne Meara in Kate McShane; he followed this with a one-year hitch on the detective series Delvecchio. In 1977, he made his big-screen entree in The Choirboys. In 1981, Haid played good-ole-boy police officer Andy Renko in the TV series Hill Street Blues, a role he essayed until the series' cancellation in 1987 (Renko was shot down and presumed killed in the opening episode, but audience reaction to Haid was so positive that he was resurrected in episode #2). Having directed several Hill Street episodes, Haid was well prepared for his feature-length directorial debut, the cable-TV production Cooperstown; Haid has since directed Iron Will (1994), a seriocomedy about dogsledding, for the big screen. Charles Haid is married to actress Deborah Richter. Charles Haid is the cousin of talk-show host Merv Griffin.

Trivia: Emigrated to the United Kingdom with his family at the age of 3. Is a member of the Royal Shakepspeare Company and appeared as Mephistopheles in Faust in 1995. Is the longest serving member of the Holby City cast - 15 years as of 2016.

Trivia: Cofounded the Dog Company in the late 1970s with friend Clive Barker, who wrote and directed the theater group's plays, which Bradley starred in. Made his big-screen debut as Pinhead in Barker's Hellraiser (1987), which spawned several sequels. Published his first book in 1996, Behind the Mask of the Horror Actor, which examines film monsters and the actors who've portrayed them. Was inducted into Fangoria magazine's Hall of Fame in 1989 and received a Career Award at the 25th annual Fantasporto festival in Portugal.

Trivia: American writer/actor/director Norton S. Parker is best known for his dialogue contributions to the quasi-documentary film Tundra (1936). When this film was remodeled and reissued in 1949 as Arctic Fury, Parker returned to work on the newly shot scenes. Otherwise, he was most closely associated with Westerns, churning out scripts for films with titles like Courage of the West, Young Bill Hickok, Cyclone on Horseback, and Rio Grande Raiders. Norton S. Parker's last screen credit was RKO's Devil's Canyon (1953).

Trivia: John Agar was one of a promising group of leading men to emerge in the years after World War II. He never became the kind of star that he seemed destined to become in mainstream movies, but he did find a niche in genre films a decade later. Agar was the son of a Chicago meatpacker and never aspired to an acting career until fate took a hand in 1945, when he met Shirley Temple, the former child star and one of the most famous young actresses in Hollywood. In a whirlwind romance, the 17-year-old Temple married the 25-year-old Agar. His good looks made him seem a natural candidate for the screen and, in 1946, he was signed to a six-year contract by producer David O. Selznick. He never actually appeared in any of Selznick's movies, but his services were loaned out at a considerable profit to the producer, beginning in 1948 with his screen debut (opposite Temple) in John Ford's classic cavalry drama Fort Apache, starring John Wayne and Henry Fonda. His work in that movie led to a still larger role in Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, also starring Wayne. Those films were to mark the peak of Agar's mainstream film career, though John Wayne, who took a liking to the younger actor, saw to it that he had a major role in The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), which was one of the most popular war movies of its era. In 1949, however, Temple divorced Agar and his career slowed considerably; apart from the film he did with Wayne, the most notable aspect of his career that year was his appearance in the anti-Communist potboiler I Married a Communist (aka The Woman on Pier 13). During the early '50s, he appeared in a series of low-budget programmers such as The Magic Carpet, one of Lucille Ball's last feature films prior to the actress becoming a television star, and played leads in second features, including the offbeat comedy The Rocket Man. Agar seemed destined to follow in the same downward career path already blazed by such failed mid-'40s leading men as Sonny Tufts, when a film came along at Universal-International in 1955 that gave his career a second wind. The studio was preparing a sequel to its massively popular Creature From the Black Lagoon, directed by Jack Arnold, and needed a new leading man; Agar's performance in an independent film called The Golden Mistress had impressed the studio and he was signed to do the movie. Revenge of the Creature, directed by Arnold, was nearly as successful as its predecessor, and Agar had also come off well, playing a two-fisted scientist. He was cast as the lead in Arnold's next science fiction film, Tarantula, then in a Western, Star in the Dust, and then in The Mole People, another science fiction title. In between, he also slipped in a leading-man performance in Hugo Haas' crime drama Hold Back Tomorrow. He left Universal when the studio refused to give him roles in a wider range of movies, but his career move backfired, limiting him almost entirely to science fiction and Western movies for the next decade. In 1956, the same year that he did The Mole People, Agar made what was arguably the most interesting of all his 1950s films, Flesh and the Spur, directed by Edward L. Cahn for American International. The revenge Western, in which he played a dual role, wasn't seen much beyond the drive-in circuit, however, and was not widely shown on television; it is seldom mentioned in his biographies despite the high quality of the acting and writing. Agar was most visible over the next few years in horror and science fiction films, including Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, Attack of the Puppet People, The Brain From Planet Arous, Invisible Invaders, and Journey to the Seventh Planet. Every so often, he would also work in a mainstream feature such as Joe Butterfly or odd independent features like Lisette, but it was the science fiction films that he was most closely associated with and where he found an audience and a fandom. Coupled with his earlier movies for Universal, those films turned Agar into one of the most visible and popular leading men in science fiction cinema and a serious screen hero to millions of baby-boomer preteens and teenagers. The fact that his performances weren't bad -- and as in The Brain From Planet Arous, were so good they were scary -- also helped. It required a special level of talent to make these movies work and Agar was perfect in them, very convincing whether playing a man possessed by aliens invaders or a scientist trying to save the Earth. In 1962, he made Hand of Death, a film seemingly inspired in part by Robert Clarke's The Hideous Sun Demon, about a scientist transformed into a deadly monster, that has become well known in the field because of its sheer obscurity: The movie has dropped out of distribution and nobody seems to know who owns it or even who has materials on Hand of Death. By the time of its release, however, this kind of movie was rapidly losing its theatrical audience, as earlier examples from the genre (including Agar's own Universal titles) began showing up regularly on television. Hollywood stopped making them and roles dried up for the actor. He appeared in a series of movies for producer A.C. Lyles, including the Korean War drama The Young and the Brave and a pair of Westerns, Law of the Lawless and Johnny Reno, both notable for their casts of aging veteran actors, as well as in a few more science fiction films. In Arthur C. Pierce's Women of the Prehistoric Planet, Agar pulled a Dr. McCoy, playing the avuncular chief medical officer in the crew of a spaceship and also had starring roles in a pair of low-budget Larry Buchanan films for American International Pictures, Zontar, the Thing From Venus and Curse of the Swamp Creature. Amid all of these low-budget productions, however, Agar never ceased to try and keep his hand in mainstream entertainment -- there were television appearances that showed what he could do as a serious actor, perhaps most notably the 1959 Perry Mason episode "The Case of the Caretaker's Cat" (where he was billed as "John G. Agar," perhaps an effort to separate that work from his recent films) and tragic title role in the Branded episode "The Sheriff" (1967); and he always seemed to give 100% effort in those less classy oaters, horror outings, and space operas.His career after that moved into the realm of supporting and character parts, including a small but key role in Roger Corman's first big-budget, big-studio film The St. Valentine's Day Massacre. He returned to working with John Wayne in three Westerns, The Undefeated, Chisum, and Big Jake, and turned up every so often in bit parts and supporting roles, sometimes in big-budget, high-profile films such as the 1976 remake of King Kong, but mostly he supported himself by selling insurance. In the 1990s, however, Agar was rediscovered by directors such as John Carpenter, who began using him in their movies and television productions, and he worked onscreen in small roles into the 21st century until his death in 2002.