Trivia: Solidly built American actor Craig T. Nelson started out as a comedy writer and performer, doing radio and nightspot gigs in the Los Angeles area. Success was not immediately forthcoming, and Nelson took a four-year sabbatical from show business, moving with his family to a remote cabin in Northern California. In 1979, he made his first film, ...And Justice For All, written by his onetime partner Barry Levinson. While subsequent roles in Poltergeist and Silkwood followed, Nelson would find true stardom on television. For eight seasons beginning in 1989, he starred as college athletics instuctor Hayden Fox on the top-ranked ABC sitcom Coach. Appearing alongside supporting players Jerry Van Dyke and Shelly Fabares, Nelson received an Emmy for his work on the show in 1992.After Coach, Nelson showed up in a few small roles in feature films and television mini-series before returning to series work in 2000, leading the cast of CBS's D.C.-based cop-drama The District. While enjoying the success of that show, Nelson found time for his first high-profile feature film role in over a decade, providing the voice of the head of a family of superheroes in the 2004 Disney/Pixar animated film The Incredibles. In 2005 he played the patriarch of the dysfunctional clan in The Family Stone, and followed that up two years later as skating coach in the comedy Blades of Glory. He was Ryan Reynolds disapproving dad in the hit comedy The Proposal in 2009. He was cast as the head of the Braverman clan in NBC's relaunch of Parenthood in 2010, and appeared in the inspirational Soul Surfer in 2011.

Trivia: American actress Lynne Thigpen was part of the original cast of the stage musical Godspell in 1971. She reprised her role for the 1973 film and went on to work for three decades on both the stage and screen. Theatrical audiences may remember her for her Tony-nominated lead role in Tintypes, but she is probably best known as the Chief, the host of the PBS educational game shows Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? and Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego? On the big screen, Thigpen appeared in the mainstream features Tootsie, Lean on Me, and Bob Roberts. However, she fared much better in powerful roles on television. She was Aunt Grace Keefer on All My Children, DA Ruby Thomas on L.A. Law, and Judge Ida Boucher on Law & Order. Other TV appearances include thirtysomething, Homicide: Life on the Street, and several Hallmark Hall of Fame features. Possessing rich, powerful speech, Thigpen lent her voice to several different projects. Already known on PBS as the Chief, she narrated stories on Reading Rainbow and provided voices for Bear in the Big Blue House. She also read best-selling novels audiobooks, including titles by Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. After a lengthy career on-stage, two Obie awards, and an L.A. Drama Critics award, Thigpen finally received her first Tony award in 1997 for her portrayal of Dr. Judith Kaufman in Wendy Wasserstein's An American Daughter. She reprised her role for the 2000 made-for-TV adaptation, released on home video with the title Trial by Media. That same year, she was cast as statistics clerk Ella Mae Farmer in the CBS dramatic series The District. On the big screen, she played authority figures like President Marjorie Bota in Bicentennial Man and Judge Brenda Daniels in Anger Management. A shock to her fellow cast members on The District, Thigpen died of a heart attack in her Los Angeles home in 2003. She was 54.

Trivia: A talented actor who began to win due notice in the late '90s, Sean Patrick Thomas broke through to mainstream audiences with winning turns in such films as Cruel Intentions (1999) and Save the Last Dance (2001). The son of immigrants from Guyana, Thomas was born in Wilmington, DE, in 1970. While attending the University of Virginia, where he studied English and planned to become a lawyer, Thomas decided to pursue a career in acting after auditioning for a student production of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun. Thomas broke into film with small roles in productions that included Courage Under Fire (1996), Conspiracy Theory (1997), and Can't Hardly Wait (1998). In 1996, he further added to his acting credentials by earning an M.A. in drama from New York University. Relative fame and even a blush of notoriety greeted the actor in 1999, with a pivotal role in Cruel Intentions, Roger Kumble's free and loose adaptation of Choderlos De Laclos' Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Co-starring alongside alpha-teens Sarah Michelle Gellar, Reese Witherspoon, and Ryan Phillippe in the torrid tale of lust, betrayal, and negligent parenting on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Thomas earned (literal) exposure as the cello teacher/illicit lover of one of the film's principle characters. Even greater exposure followed for Thomas the subsequent year, when he was cast in a substantial role as Detective Temple Page on the critically acclaimed TV series The District. Riding high, he then won his first starring role on the big screen in Save the Last Dance (2001), an interracial love story set in Chicago's South Side that featured him as a black high school student in love with a white classmate (Julia Stiles). Although the film earned mixed reviews, it found an appreciative audience, and with it, a growing fan base for the young actor.

Trivia: With his handsome looks and playful demeanor, Justin Theroux made a memorable feature debut as a determined revolutionary in the successful indie film I Shot Andy Warhol.A graduate of Bennington College who was born and raised in Washington, D.C., Theroux later relocated to New York to pursue a career in the visual arts before stumbling across acting and immersing himself in the stage. Gaining momentum in off-Broadway plays before making the leap to features, Theroux made appearances in such popular television shows as Sex and the City and Ally McBeal while gravitating toward the big screen in Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion (1997), American Psycho, and eccentric director David Lynch's Mullholland Drive. After appearing in Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle and the dud Duplex, Theroux appeared in a couple of episodes of the critically respected HBO series Six Feet Under. Over the next couple of years he combined little independent projects like The Baxter and Strangers with Candy with more high-profile films like Michael Mann's Miami Vice. He reteamed with David Lynch for Inland Empire alongside other former Lynch collaborators Laura Dern, and Hayy Dean Stanton. He played Jesus in the religious-themed comedy The Ten, and in 2008 he co-wrote Ben Stiller's Hollywood satire Tropic Thunder, which led to an assignment writing the hit sequel Iron Man 2. In 2012 he co-starred in Wanderlust opposite Jennifer Aniston who he ended up in a high-profile relationship with. That same year he had a screenwriting credit on the hair-metal musical Rock of Ages. Theroux next starred in the bleak HBO drama The Leftovers and wrote the screenplay for Zoolander 2.

Trivia: Is a practicing Quaker. Her first professional role was as Isabella in Measure for Measure at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. Made her Broadway debut as an understudy in The SeagulI in 1992. Performed as Katherine in the New York Shakespeare Festival stage production of Henry V. Played Brooke Wyeth in the off-Broadway premiere of Other Desert Cities in 2011; when the show transfered to Broadway, she was replaced by Rachel Griffith, but later joined the show as a replacement.

Trivia: Worked for three years as a medical doctor in Adelaide, Sydney and London before relocating to the U.S. to pursue a career in acting. Got his first break in 1996, when he joined the cast of the U.S. TV show New York Undercover. After living in the U.S. for 17 years, he had to work with an accent coach to recapture his Australian accent. Is a bit of a "motor-head"; rebuilt a 1973 Dodge Challenger by himself.

Trivia: After one year in college as an art major Cassidy dropped out and got married, but the marriage didn't last. She moved to San Francisco and worked successfully as a model; she also appeared briefly in two films shot there, Bullitt (1968) and Fools (1970), then went four years without another screen role, meanwhile finding some work in TV commercials. Her first significant screen appearance was in a small role in the San Francisco police drama The Laughing Policeman (1974), which led to work in two more films that year; in the second of these, Bank Shot (1974), she got her first prominent billing. Cassidy had many unmemorable roles over the next few years, finally making an impression in a successful film with Blade Runner (1982); after that she got better roles in better films, but has yet to become a widely known screen actress.

Trivia: The long-estranged daughter of the late film star Klaus Kinski, German actress Nastassja Kinski began her career in her teens. According to most sources, her first film was director Wim Wenders' The Wrong Move (1975), although there is evidence that a German television movie directed by Wolfgang Petersen, For Your Love Only (1976), was produced first. Still not yet 20, Kinski fell in love with the much-older filmmaker Roman Polanski, who subsidized her acting training. After taking drama classes in New York and London, Kinski was deemed ready by Polanski to star in Tess (1980), a lavishly produced adaptation of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Shortly thereafter, Kinski became the dream of male college undergraduates everywhere by posing for a Richard Avedon poster wearing nothing but a large, live python which spiralled around her body. Kinski's next few films tended to capitalize on her physical attributes rather than her very real talent; in Cat People (1982), directed by her then-lover Paul Schrader, the actress' character transformed into a panther after having sex; and in Exposed (1983), she participated in one of the goofiest moments of screen erotica in history when co-star Rudolf Nureyev "played" her body with a cello bow. Compared to scenes like these, Kinski's appearance as Dudley Moore's wife in Unfaithfully Yours (1984) was downright puritanical -- but it was back to the bizarre with her role as a woman dressed in a bear suit in The Hotel New Hampshire (1985). At this point, Kinski's film output was getting a bit too beyond the fringe for most filmgoers, and she spent much of the next decade in "artistic" movies of little box-office appeal (Torrents of Spring [1989], Faraway, So Close [1991]). For a brief time, she remained in the public eye thanks to several well-publicized romances and because she gave birth to a baby without (at first) revealing the name of the father, allowing the world press to go into an torrent of speculation (the father turned out to be Egyptian producer Ibrahim Moussa, who briefly became her husband). In the early '90s, Kinski dropped from view altogether, devoting herself to her marriage to pop-music maestro Quincy Jones. In 1994, Kinski made a surprising reappearance in the "normal" role of a KGB agent in the popular movie thriller Terminal Velocity (1994) -- managing to remain clothed in her big scene, in which she was locked inside the trunk of a car and thrown from a plane in flight.The mid-nineties didn't do much to bolster Kinski's resume; Martin Donovan's Somebody is Waiting was a particularly embarrassing flop, and a series of minor television appearances (The Ring, Bella Mafia Parts I & II) were not met with any amount of critical or audience acclaim. Luckily, her film appearances fared marginally better -- in Father's Day (1997), the young actress was given the chance to perform alongside cinema veterans Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, while Antonio Tibaldi's Little Boy Blue (1997) with Ryan Phillipe found the actress in a game performance as the brutalized matriarch of an extraordinarily dysfunctional family. Kinski would go on to tackle increasingly serious subject matter in the AIDS drama One Night Stand (1997), The Lost Son (1999), a crime drama revolving around a network of pedophiles, and Peter Antonijevic's war film Savior (1998). Kinski's role choices took a lighter turn for Your Friends and Neighbors, director Neil LaBute's comedy of manners which starred the young actress as an unpredictable art assistant, and later in the made-for-cable romantic comedy TimeShare. By the late nineties, Kinski's acting was finally drawing some recognition, particularly for her part in David Bailey's psychological thriller The Intruder, as well as 2000s The Claim, another UK/Canadian collaboration. In 2001, Kinski starred alongside William Baldwin and Hart Bochner in Say Nothing, in which she played a troubled housewife whose one-time affair would turn out to be with her husband's new boss, and also received some critical acclaim for her role in American Rhapsody with Scarlett Johansson. Indeed, 2001 was a busy year for Natassja -- in addition to Say Nothing and American Rhapsody, Kinski starred in The Day the World Ended, a relatively well-received made-for-television sci-fi feature, as well as Blind Thriller, Cold Heart, and a complicated part in Joseph Brutsman's The Diary of a Sex Addict. In Town & Country (also in 2001), Kinski participated among an all-star cast including Diane Keaton, Goldie Hawn, Warren Beatty, and Andie MacDowell, among others. Understandably, the actress took a well-deserved break in 2002 -- her only role to speak of was a small part in Rip It Off, which featured Kinski as one of two women to have a fall-out with her boyfriend on the eve of a massive heist. A year later, Kinski joined Rupert Everett and Catherine Deneuve for Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a French-Canadian remake of the ever popular Dangerous Liaisons.