Trivia: An eighth-generation Texan, actor Tommy Lee Jones, born September 15th, 1946, attended Harvard University, where he roomed with future U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Though several of his less-knowledgeable fans have tended to dismiss Jones as a roughhewn redneck, the actor was equally at home on the polo fields (he's a champion player) as the oil fields, where he made his living for many years.After graduating cum laude from Harvard in 1969, Jones made his stage debut that same year in A Patriot for Me; in 1970, he appeared in his first film, Love Story (listed way, way down the cast list as one of Ryan O'Neal's fraternity buddies). Interestingly enough, while Jones was at Harvard, he and roommate Gore provided the models for author Erich Segal while he was writing the character of Oliver, the book's (and film's) protagonist. After this supporting role, Jones got his first film lead in the obscure Canadian film Eliza's Horoscope (1975). Following a spell on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live, he gained national attention in 1977 when he was cast in the title role in the TV miniseries The Amazing Howard Hughes, his resemblance to the title character -- both vocally and visually -- positively uncanny. Five years later, Jones won further acclaim and an Emmy for his startling performance as murderer Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song. Jones spent the rest of the '80s working in both television and film, doing his most notable work on such TV miniseries as Lonesome Dove (1989), for which he earned another Emmy nomination. It was not until the early '90s that the actor became a substantial figure in Hollywood, a position catalyzed by a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his role in Oliver Stone's JFK. In 1993, Jones won both that award and a Golden Globe for his driven, starkly funny portrayal of U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard in The Fugitive. His subsequent work during the decade was prolific and enormously varied. In 1994 alone, he could be seen as an insane prison warden in Natural Born Killers; titular baseball hero Ty Cobb in Cobb; a troubled army captain in Blue Sky; a wily federal attorney in The Client; and a psychotic bomber in Blown Away. Jones was also attached to a number of big-budget action movies, hamming it up as the crazed Two-Face in Batman Forever (1995); donning sunglasses and an attitude to play a special agent in Men in Black (1997); and reprising his Fugitive role for the film's 1998 sequel, U.S. Marshals. The following year, he continued this trend, playing Ashley Judd's parole officer in the psychological thriller Double Jeopardy. The late '90s and millennial turnover found Jones' popularity soaring, and the distinguished actor continued to develop a successful comic screen persona (Space Cowboys [2000] and Men in Black II [2002]), in addition to maintaining his dramatic clout with roles in such thrillers as The Rules of Engagement (2000) and The Hunted (2003).2005 brought a comedic turn for the actor, who starred in the madcap comedy Man of the House as a grizzled police officer in tasked to protect a house full of cheerleaders who witnessed a murder. Jones also took a stab at directing that year, helming and starring in the western crime drama The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. In 2006, Jones appeared in Robert Altman's film adaptation of A Prairie Home Companion, based on Garrison Keillor's long running radio show. The movie's legendary director, much loved source material and all-star cast made the film a safe bet for the actor, who hadn't done much in the way of musical comedy. Jones played the consumate corporate bad guy with his trademark grit.2007 brought two major roles for the actor. He headlined the Iraq war drama In the Valley of Elah for director Paul Haggis. His work as the veteran father of a son who died in the war earned him strong reviews and an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. However more people saw Jones' other film from that year, the Coen brothers adaptation of No Country for Old Men. His work as a middle-aged Texas sheriff haunted by the acts of the evil man he hunts earned him a Screen Actors Guild nomination for Best Supporting Actor. The actor co-starred with Stanley Tucci and Neal McDonough for 2011's blockbuster Captain America: The First Avenger, and reprised his role as a secret agent in Men in Black 3 (2011). In 2012 he played a Congressman fighting to help Abraham Lincoln end slavery in Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, a role that led to an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Trivia: Known for his dark intensity and idiosyncratic performances, Benicio Del Toro became one of Hollywood's more unique actors. His looks suggesting a hidden background as Wednesday Addams' hunky older brother, he first became known to film audiences in 1995 with his breakthrough performance in The Usual Suspects. Born February 19, 1967 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, Del Toro was the son of lawyers. His mother died when he was nine, and, four years later, his father moved the family to Mercersberg, PA, where they lived on a farm. While attending the University of California at San Diego, where he was working toward a business degree, Del Toro took an acting class and was soon hooked. He appeared in a number of student productions, one of which led to a stint performing at a drama festival at New York's Lafayette Theatre. Del Toro decided to remain in New York to study acting at the Circle in the Square Acting School and won a scholarship to the Stella Adler Conservatory.A move to Los Angeles, where he studied at the Actors Circle Theatre, led to Del Toro's first television roles, which included a guest spot on Miami Vice and an appearance as a drug dealer on the miniseries Drug Wars: The Camarena Story (1990). The actor also began showing up in feature films, perhaps most notably as Duke the Dog-Faced Boy in Big Top Pee-wee (1988). Despite fairly steady work, Del Toro was still virtually unknown when he was cast as the eccentric criminal Fenster in Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects. His slurred, otherworldly performance earned widespread praise, an Independent Spirit Award, and, coupled with the film's great success, Del Toro was soon thrust into the limelight that had hitherto eluded him. The actor followed up The Usual Suspects with a supporting role as the titular artist's best friend in Julian Schnabel's Basquiat (1996). Despite intriguing subject matter and a stellar cast, the film was something of a critical and commercial disappointment, although Del Toro's work did earn him a second Independent Spirit Award. Having thus put his trademark on offbeat character acting -- something that was also helped by his role as a gangster in Abel Ferrara's The Funeral (1996) -- Del Toro played a romantic lead opposite Alicia Silverstone in Excess Baggage (1997), a botched caper comedy that cast the actor as a bumbling car thief.Del Toro's next film, Terry Gilliam's much anticipated 1998 adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, would receive an intensely mixed critical reception. A drug-addled, hallucinatory odyssey, it starred Del Toro as Dr. Gonzo, protagonist Raoul Duke's (Johnny Depp basically playing Thompson) partner in crime. Del Toro earned strong notices for his portrayal of the portly, freewheeling, Samoan lawyer (based on real-life Thompson cohort Oscar Acosta), and his performance was widely touted as one of the best aspects of the film. Del Torogained further notice when he won several awards -- including the Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe and Oscar -- for his role as a Mexican cop entangled in the international drug-trade war in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic (2000). The next year, Del Toro played a mentally disabled man wrongly accused of murder in director Sean Penn's sad tale of obsession, The Pledge, and earned his second Academy Award nomination for his performance in 21 Grams in 2003. Del Toro made his directorial debut in 2004, reuniting with Depp for an adaptation of another Hunter Thompson book, The Rum Diaries. He was also starred in Che (2008), Terrence Malick's biopic about Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. This role led t many awards, including the Best Actor Award at the celebrated Cannes Film Festival. Later, in 2010, Del Toro starred in a remake of The Wolf Man, the classic creature feature from Lon Chaney, Jr.

Trivia: Hailed in Entertainment Weekly's 2000 Hot Issue as a mature female sex symbol, transplanted Dane Connie Nielsen also revealed that she could act in the Best Picture-winning blockbuster Gladiator (2000).Raised in Copenhagen, Nielsen trained to be a singer and dancer, as well as an actress. She began performing at age 15, with her mother, in local shows and headed to Paris when she was 18, to pursue her career in earnest. After stints in Italy and South Africa, the multi-lingual Nielsen finally landed in New York; she made her English language film debut as a terrorized passenger in the made-for-TV thriller Voyage (1993).Nielsen really began to attract Hollywood's attention, however, with her performance as the sizzlingly seductive, redheaded daughter of Satan (Al Pacino) in the supernatural potboiler The Devil's Advocate (1997). Along with smaller roles in the drug addiction drama Permanent Midnight (1998) and Wes Anderson's Rushmore (1998) (as the gorgeous mother of Max's friend Dirk), Nielsen landed her first starring role in 1998, as a planet pioneer who nurses Kurt Russell back to health in the science fiction actioner Soldier. Following roles in the low profile thriller Dark Summer (1999) and the higher profile Brian De Palma sci-fi saga Mission to Mars (2000), Nielsen notched a critically acclaimed hit with Ridley Scott's sword and sandal epic Gladiator. As the emperor's sister Lucilla, Nielsen got to hold her own against Joaquin Phoenix's scenery-chewing Commodus while falling in love with and quietly championing Russell Crowe's steely Maximus, proving that she could do more than just look good in Gladiator's Roman chic. Moving ever-closer to widespread recognition, Nielsen played a member of a family who attracts a menacing photo clerk (a dark turn by funnyman Robin Williams) in the taut thriller One Hour Photo. Alternating between smaller independent films and big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas, Nielsen turned up in Demonlover before turning back to the bright lights of Tinseltown with Basic and The Hunted (both 2003). Nielsen has one son.

Trivia: Though she has an Ivy League degree, Leslie Stefanson decided to parlay her all-American beauty into a modeling and acting career in the 1990s. Raised in Moorhead, MN, Stefanson left behind her small-town roots to attend Columbia University's Barnard College in New York City. First stepping in front of the cameras as a model, Stefanson added acting to her resume a couple of years after graduation with a bit part in the comedy The Cowboy Way (1994). Stefanson bolstered her new career with small roles in The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) and Flubber (1997), as well as playing Helen Hunt's fellow waitress in the Oscar-winning hit As Good As It Gets (1997). Stefanson landed her first starring role in the comic thriller Delivered (1998), but it was the flashy John Travolta vehicle The General's Daughter (1999) that finally earned her more than passing notice. As the mysteriously murdered title character, Stefanson's wholesome blondeness became an innocent, fragile surface for the military woman's seamy after-hours exploits and dark past. Though the critics deemed the onscreen treatment of the general's daughter grossly exploitative, complete with an overly stylized gang rape, The General's Daughter became a summer hit. Stefanson further raised her profile the following year by playing Joan Kennedy in the TV miniseries Jackie, Ethel, Joan: the Women of Camelot (2000) and by taking a small role in Hollywood wunderkind M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable (2000). But her lead performance in Sally Field's critically lambasted beauty pageant satire Beautiful (2000), was little-seen.

Trivia: With a countenance that can effortlessly suggest a beleaguered everyman or a no-nonsense tough, American character actor John Finn has sustained a prolonged and impressively varied career. A New York City native, Finn received one of his earliest assignments under the aegis of Stuart Rosenberg, as Ginty in the ethnic drama (and cult hit) The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984). The actor's resumé over the following ten years packed in a series of key Hollywood films of varying quality -- from the wonderful Ed Zwick drama Glory (1989) and the fine Alan Pakula political thriller The Pelican Brief (1993) to the Bob Clark buddy comedy Loose Cannons (1990). Finn also appeared in occasional telemovies, notably the 1991 Posing: Inspired by Three Real Stories, as Jimmy Lanahan, the husband of homemaker-turned-Playmate Meredith Lanahan (Lynda Carter). After appearances on such hit series as The X-Files, Frasier, and NYPD Blue, and parts in the major studio releases Catch Me If You Can and Analyze That (2002), Finn landed one of his first regular series roles, playing Lieutenant John Stillman on the popular detective program Cold Case.

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: University of Oklahoma alumnus Lonny Chapman inaugurated his professional acting career in 1948. While co-starring in the Broadway production of Come Back Little Sheba, Chapman arranged for his college chum Dennis Weaver to understudy for him. Weaver went on to TV fame as Chester on the Western series Gunsmoke, while Chapman prospered as a film character actor, playing such roles as Roy in East of Eden (1955), Rock in Baby Doll (1957), and Deke Carter in Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). On TV, Lonny Chapman starred as private eye Jeff Prior in the 1958 summer-replacement series The Investigator, and was featured as another detective, Frank Malloy, in the 1965 courtroom weekly For the People (1965).

Trivia: With his bald head and beefy exterior, Hollywood character player Rex Linn quickly built up an acting resumé replete with many portrayals of toughs, feds, cops, thugs, and -- occasionally -- unremarkable, beleaguered everymen. Born in the panhandle of the Lone Star State, Linn came of age in the small Texas town of Spearman. He discovered a lingering interest in drama during his teenage years, but buckled under the weight of discouragement from an acting coach, and put acting on the shelf to focus on career pursuits in banking and the oil industry. Dissatisfied with these fields, Linn convinced an Oklahoma talent agent to sign him, and made the leap from commercials to feature roles with his portrayal of serial murderer Fred Epps in the Peter Masterson-directed thriller Night Game (1989), opposite Roy Scheider. The pleasure of this experience prompted Linn to head to the West Coast, where he worked construction, landed intermittent acting assignments, and studied the craft under the tutelage of Silvana Gallardo in Studio City, CA. Linn was memorable as the rogue treasury agent who assists terrorist John Lithgow in the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger (1993), which brought the actor the recognition he so persistently sought and led to a series of supporting roles in dozens of feature films. Linn's portrayal of Frank McLaury in Wyatt Earp (1994) marked the first in a series of several onscreen collaborations with Kevin Costner that also included the romantic comedy Tin Cup (1996) and the laborious sci-fi epic The Postman (1997). Linn also landed guest appearances on such series as JAG and 3rd Rock From the Sun. He is best known, however, for his fine portrayal of Miami-Dade Police Department detective Frank Tripp on the hit crime series CSI: Miami.

Trivia: Supporting actor, onscreen from the '80s.

Trivia: Emerging into the public's consciousness in 1958, country & western performer Johnny Cash hit his first popularity peak in the mid-'60s with his hard-driving prison, train, and "underdog" ballads. Changing tastes, coupled with his own volatile temperament, resulted in as many lows as highs in the late 20th century, but Cash is a survivor, and was still very much on hand for the country & western upsurge of the late '80s. His first film appearances were in shapeless semi-concert pictures like Hootenanny Hoot (1963), but he went on to excel as a naturalistic actor in such Westerns as A Gunfight (1971) and The Last Days of Frank and Jesse James (1986). Johnny Cash is shown to best cinematic advantage as "himself" in the 1970 documentary Johnny Cash: The Man, His World, His Music, which features Cash's wife, June Carter. Cash was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from Lincoln Center in 1997.Still hugely popular as the millennuim turned, the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards found Cash's video for the song "Hurt" nominated for no less than six awards. The reflective video ultimately took home the prize for Best Cinematography, cementing Cash's status as an artist whose musical stylings truly knew no boundries. Shortly thereafter, in early September of 2003, Johnny Cash died of complications of diabetes in Nashville, TN. at the age of 71. His death came just four short months after that of his longtime wife June Carter Cash.