Trivia: Raised in a trailer park in Lake Orion, MI, following her parents' divorce; both her father and brother are electrical engineers. As a teenager, survived a three-year bout with immune thrombocytopenia, a life-threatening blood disease. Was one of two opening-night understudies for the 1993-94 off-Broadway production of John Patrick Shanley's Four Dogs and a Bone; Debra Messing was the other. Made her TV debut in a 1994 episode of New York Undercover. Won a Daytime Emmy (Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series) in 1998 for her role on Guiding Light.

Trivia: Gerald McRaney was 14 when he was possessed with the notion to become an actor. Five years later, McRaney landed a job with a New Orleans rep company, laboring away as an oil-field worker during the off-season. In 1969, he made his film bow in the Southern-fried cheapie The Night of Bloody Horror. Moving to LA in 1971, he took acting lessons with Jeff Corey, struggling to lose his Mississippi accent, and drove a cab between TV jobs. For nearly a decade, McRaney paid the rent by playing murderers, psychos and rapists. The actor was finally "humanized" as down-home, college-educated private eye Rick Simon on the breezy detective series Simon and Simon, which ran from 1981 to 1988. After this, he was briefly considered for the starring role in Coach; instead, he was cast as Marine major J. D. "Mac" McGillis in the long-running (1989-93) family sitcom Major Dad. He made his directorial debut with the 1991 TV movie Love and Curses...And All That Jazz, in which he also starred. In 1995, he was brought in to hypo the flagging CBS drama series Central Park West; when this series tanked, he resurfaced as the star of the "family values" weekly drama Promised Land (1996), a spin-off of his guest appearance on TV's Touched by an Angel. McRaney's second wife was Designing Woman co-star Delta Burke.

Trivia: Went to college to study marine biology before turning his focus to acting. Trained at Playhouse West in North Hollywood and later became a teacher there. Film debut was in 1987's Fatal Beauty. Was nominated along with the rest of the cast of 2005's Capote for a Screen Actors Guild Award (Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture). Known for playing several supernatural characters: the mysterious near-immortal Jacob on Lost, Lucifer on Supernatural and a vampire boss on Being Human. Studies various types of martial arts.

Trivia: Louise Lombard lived and breathed the fine arts from an early age, and projected extreme versatility in many arenas. A trained dancer and actress from early childhood, Lombard graduated to television commercials by age 14, and subsequently delved into dramatic roles. Lombard evinced a remarkable predilection for emotionally and psychologically challenging evocations, such as that of a heroin addict in a PSA directed by Jon Amiel (Copycat). After gracing the BBC series Casualty and Bergerac, the ITV show Capital City, and the ITV telemovies Catherine Cookson's A Black Velvet Gown, and Perfect Scoundrels: Sweeter Than Wine, Lombard broke through to national fame in 1991, with the lead role of Evangeline Eliott in the three-season House of Eliott series on the BBC. The story concerns two sisters who travel the road from extreme poverty to wealth as proprietors of the most successful dressmaking business in all of England.For the remainder of the 1990s, Lombard sought out a series of highly individualized and intelligent projects, including Elizabeth Gill's 1997 ensemble drama Gold in the Streets (as the girlfriend of an illegal Irish immigrant) and the ITV series Bodyguards (as one of the toughs of the title). After a brief tenure as a literature student at Cambridge University (as well as studying photography and print work at St. Martin's College), Lombard spent the first decade of the new millennium branching out into more internationally oriented roles, including insurance investigator Ellen Brachman in the Dutch movie Claim (2000), and the part of Kath in My Kingdom (2001), a highly modernized adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear. American viewers, however, will most closely associate Lombard with the romantic lead of Lady Anne Davenport in the Viggo Mortensen period adventure saga Hidalgo (2004), and the role of Dr. Harriet Fellows, a physician who assists crash survivor Alec Baldwin, in the TNT telemovie Second Nature (2003).

Trivia: Conny Van Dyke's career in movies lasted little more than a decade and only involved roles in four features, but at least two of them were fairly widely seen, either as cult exploitation titles of the late '60s or as pop culture touchstones of the 1970s. Born in Nassawadox, VA, she was raised mostly in Detroit, where her family moved in the early '50s. The family's connection to a local church led her to the beginnings of a modeling career before she was a teenager, which, in turn, led to her television breakthrough. Hired at 14 to appear on a local show called Our Lady of Charm on WXYZ in Detroit, she was seen by Soupy Sales, who had a midday children's program on the same station and who convinced Van Dyke to get an agent. At 15, in 1960, she entered and won the Miss Teen USA competition, sponsored by Teen Magazine, the prize for which was a trip to Hollywood, a visit to Disneyland, a date with the reigning teen pop heartthrob Fabian, and her first movie role, a small supporting part in the Tom Laughlin vehicle The Young Sinner, in which Laughlin not only starred (along with a young Stephanie Powers, James Stacy, and William Wellman Jr.) but also directed. At the time, the movie seemed a one-off career event, but Van Dyke was busier than ever in Detroit, modeling and doing local television commercials. Her recording career came about through a singing engagement at a local drive-in, which led to an introduction to Berry Gordy, who signed her to the fledgling Motown label as its first white female artist; she appeared locally with the Supremes (they even sang behind her when she was on stage) and also toured with Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Mickey Stevenson, Martha & the Vandellas, the Temptations, and the Four Tops. Her time at Motown lasted only a year, after which she moved to Wheelsville Records, later to Epic Records, and also started appearing on local music shows such as Robin Seymour's Swingin' Time. Van Dyke was based in New York for several years, modeling and singing, and also appeared on The Tonight Show, but it wasn't until she returned to Los Angeles that she became a working actress, appearing on shows like Adam 12 and Ironside. Her second film came about as a result of her appearance in a commercial directed by Tom Madden, who was later making a feature film and picked her for the female lead. Hells Angels '69 was notable for its violence and sex, was Van Dyke's first starring screen role, and shooting it put her in contact with the real Hells Angels. She wasn't seen again on the big screen until the mid-'70s. Instead, partly with the encouragement of her third husband, DJ Larry Coates, music became the focus of her work for the next few years, which eventually led to another film. Coates brought her to a club in Huntsville, AL, where she was seen by country singer Steve Norman, who brought her to Nashville as a singer. A contract with Barnaby Records followed in 1972 and she made several appearances on the Grand Ole Opry television show; that, in turn, led to her being cast in the Burt Reynolds film W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, which was followed closely by Framed, a violent Phil Karlson action-drama starring Joe Don Baker. She did more television, including Police Woman, Sunshine, and Barbary Coast, as well as appearing on innumerable celebrity game shows during the 1970s and 1980s. After taking time off to raise her son in Florida, Van Dyke returned to Los Angeles and resumed her acting and singing careers.

Trivia: In 1992, refurbished an old vaudeville house and transformed it into a performance hall called Arroyo Outback Theatre for various types of artists. Played the role of Gustin in Saturn Returns at South Coast Repertory in 2009. Is a member of the Idyllwild International Festival of Cinema Grand Jury and Board of Advisors. Directed a stage production of The Odd Couple, the profits of which benefited the Idyllwild HELP Center. Was honored with the Joni Award from Idyllwild. Won a California Newspaper Publishers Award and a National Newspaper Publishers Award for his local column in a small-town newspaper. Founded and teaches at the Actors Refuge studio in Los Angeles.

Trivia: Born September 18th, 1970, actress, comedian, author, reality-show host, and occasional scriptwriter Aisha Tyler came of age in San Francisco and studied poly sci at Dartmouth College before mounting a (brief) career as an advertising executive in her hometown. Dissatisfied by this pursuit, and pining to launch herself as a full-time entertainer, Tyler "dropped out" of the corporate world and hit the road with a solo standup comedy act in the mid-'90s.Around 2001 -- after five years in Los Angeles with occasional standup bookings and concomitantly limited acclaim and recognition -- Tyler landed two huge breaks, first as the host of the irreverent Talk Soup during that program's final year (a position she inherited from Greg Kinnear, John Henson, and others), and then as the primary host of the dating series The 5th Wheel. Riding the crest of popularity generated by reality television during the first several years of the millennium, Wheel coupled the unscripted spontaneity of The Real World and Survivor with the format of the dating series Blind Date. Its premise involved setting two couples up on blind dates, having them "swap" partners, and adding an unforeseen fifth member (the "wheel" of the title) to stir things up and add provocation. The program placed a greater emphasis on erotic and suggestive content than Blind and -- perhaps as a result -- it unsurprisingly became a massive, runaway hit.The ever-ambitious Tyler, however, continued to expand her horizons. She maintained a short tenure with Wheel and quickly moved on to other endeavors, placing a particularly strong emphasis on television work. This included a stint as Charlie (the only recurring African-American cast member) in the final two seasons of the popular sitcom Friends, and a recurring role as covert terrorist Marianne Taylor on the weekly suspenser 24. Tyler also portrayed attorney Andrea Moreno (who dies in a car crash but is then "ushered" over to the other side by Jennifer Love Hewitt's psychic) in the first season (2005-2006) of the supernatural drama The Ghost Whisperer. After that, Tyler segued into feature-film work, with bit roles in such pictures as The Santa Clause 3 and .45.Six feet tall and one of the most physically breathtaking young actresses of her generation, Tyler frequently provides beauty tips in such magazines as Ebony and Glamour; she is also an outspoken proponent of physical fitness and a strenuous exerciser who pushes herself to an almost unimaginable degree. A February 2007 issue of In Style magazine reported, "In addition to scaling walls, Tyler runs, uses a rowing machine, lifts weights, snowboards and scuba dives. But for her, nothing beats the mental rush of rock climbing." In 2004, Tyler also authored and published the best-seller Swerve: Reckless Observations of a Postmodern Girl, a free-form, witty expostulation on such "hot" topics as men, bikini waxing, reality television, dating wars, sex, and body image.After filming several unremarkable movies throughout the mid-2000s, the actress found success on Archer, a television series that features Tyler as a dedicated but deadly agent for ISIS, a secret intelligence unit in New York City. While she continued work on Archer, she landed the job of co-host on The Talk, and later, host of the revamped Whose Line Is It Anyway? As if that weren't enough, Tyler also landed a recurring role on Criminal Minds in 2015.

Trivia: A veteran improv comedian, Eric Stonestreet honed his skills at the ImprovOlympic theater, but soon transitioned to the screen, making appearances on shows like ER and The West Wing during the early 2000s. He would go on to land roles in films like Ninja Cheerleaders and American Crude, but scored his biggest break when he was cast as Cameron in the sitcom Modern Family in 2009. He won an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series for that role in the acclaimed show's first season. The show remained popular, and Stonestreet ended up appearing in the big-screen comedy Bad Teacher.

Trivia: Bill Irwin certainly qualifies as one of the most unique figures in show business; attempts to compare him to other talent invariably conclude with the observation that there is no one else like Irwin, a testament to his overarching individuality. A native of Santa Monica, Irwin spent periods of his youth in Southern California and Oklahoma, then attended Oberlin College (as a theater arts major) and Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey's Clown College in Florida, where lessons learned in slapstick, pantomime, comedic improvisation, and graceful balletic would continue to inform his art and style throughout his life. Following said education, he spent various periods of time in dramatic ensembles (such as the prestigious Kraken ensemble) and circuses (such as the Frisco-based Pickle Family Circus) and racked up a litany of theatrical accomplishments that included Broadway performances in Waiting for Godot (opposite Steve Martin and Robin Williams) and Accidental Death of an Anarchist (opposite Jonathan Pryce), a critically acclaimed turn in Fool Moon (with the Red City Ramblers), and many other highlights. Meanwhile, on television, Irwin built up a substantial audience of young people with his wordless portrayal of Mr. Noodle (opposite the late Michael Jeter) on the "Elmo's World" segments of Sesame Street. Irwin's feature appearances include A Midsummer Night's Dream (1999), Igby Goes Down (2002), Lady in the Water (2007), and Rachel Getting Married (2008), and Higher Ground (2011).

Trivia: From the early '90s onward, African-American actress Paula Newsome built a fairly substantial career for herself via many small supporting roles in films and television series. She debuted on the big screen in 1992, as Ellen in Barnet Kellman's Dolly Parton comedy Straight Talk, then spent years making single-episode appearances in such programs as ER, Ally McBeal, and Law & Order, as well as multiple-episode runs on Chicago Hope, NYPD Blue, and The Lyon's Den. Newsome's career escalated most dramatically, however, between 2006 and 2007, with her contributions to the comedy Little Miss Sunshine (2006), the Adam Sandler drama Reign Over Me, the drama Things We Lost in the Fire, and the ABC detective series Women's Murder Club (as Claire Washburn, a member of an all-female team of investigators).

Trivia: As a child, lived in Ireland for five years with his family. Made his TV debut on a 2007 episode of 30 Rock. Best-known for playing Luke Cafferty on Friday Night Lights from 2009 to the series finale in 2011. Was cast in the role of Caleb Evers on FOX's 2011 drama The Chicago Code. Plays electric guitar and specializes in blues-rock.