Trivia: Blaxploitation superstar Richard Roundtree earned screen immortality during the 1970s as the legendary Shaft, "the black private dick that's the sex machine to all the chicks." Born July 9, 1942, in New Rochelle, NY, Roundtree attended college on a football scholarship but later gave up athletics to pursue an acting career. After touring as a model with the Ebony Fashion Fair, he joined the Negro Ensemble Company's acting workshop program in 1967. He made his film debut in 1970's What Do You Say to a Naked Lady?, but was still an unknown when filmmaker Gordon Parks Sr. cast him as Shaft. The role shot Roundtree to instant fame, launching the blaxploitation genre and proving so successful at the box office that it helped save MGM from the brink of bankruptcy. Thanks to the film's popularity -- as well as its two sequels, 1972's Shaft's Big Score! and the following year's Shaft in Africa, and even a short-lived television series -- Roundtree became an icon of '70s-era cool, and his image graced countless magazine covers. Outside of the Shaft franchise, he also appeared in films including the 1974 disaster epic Earthquake, 1975's Man Friday, and the blockbuster 1977 TV miniseries Roots. By the end of the decade, however, the blaxploitation movement was a thing of the past, and Roundtree's stardom waned; apart from the 1981 big-budget flop Inchon, he spent the 1980s appearing almost exclusively in TV roles or low-rent, direct-to-video features. Still, he continued working steadily, and in 1995 appeared in David Fincher's smash thriller Seven. The following year he co-starred in the acclaimed Once Upon a Time...When We Were Colored, and also teamed with fellow blaxploitation vets Pam Grier and Fred "the Hammer" Williamson in Original Gangstas. In 1997, Roundtree returned to series television in 413 Hope St.

Trivia: The youngest of the seven children of a Brooklyn contractor, Vince Edwards left vocational school when he won an athletic scholarship to Ohio State University. He subsequently gave up college to attend New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts. After working as a chorus boy in the Broadway musical High Button Shoes, Edwards fell under the spell of the then-fashionable "Method" school of acting: "whoever had the dirtiest outfit was top man on Broadway," he would later comment. Edwards tended to be cast on the basis of his physique rather than his acting ability in such films as Mr. Universe (1951) and Hiawatha (1952). After ten years of film roles of varying quality, Edwards was starred in the television series Ben Casey (1961-66), rapidly developing a reputation as "TV's surly surgeon." Toward the end of the Casey run, Edwards began dabbling in directing, an activity that he has pursued ever since. Later projects involving Vince Edwards have included the brief 1970 TV series Matt Lincoln, an attempt to establish himself as a nightclub singer, and a voiceover stint for the TV cartoon daily The Centurions.

Trivia: Born in Indiana and raised in Texas, Andrew Duggan attended Indiana University on a speech and drama scholarship. He was starred there in Maxwell Anderson's The Eve of St. Mark, which was being given a nonprofessional pre-Broadway tryout; on the basis of this performance, Duggan was cast in the professional Chicago company of the Anderson play. Before rehearsals could start, however, Duggan was drafted into the army. After wartime service, Duggan began his acting career all over again, working at his uncle's Indiana farm in-between Broadway and stock engagements. In Hollywood in the late 1950s, Duggan was co-starred in the Warner Bros. TV series Bourbon Street Beat and was featured in such films as The Bravados (1958), Seven Days in May (1964) and In Like Flint (1967). He also was starred on the 1962 TV sitcom Room for One More and the 1968 video western Lancer. Because of his marked resemblance to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Duggan was frequently cast as generals and U.S. presidents. Andrew Duggan's last screen appearance was in The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover.

Trivia: Born R. Hanley Jaeckel (the "R" stood for nothing), young Richard Jaeckel arrived in Hollywood with his family in the early 1940s. Columnist Louella Parsons, a friend of Jaeckel's mother, got the boy a job as a mailman at the 20th Century-Fox studios. When the producers of Fox's Guadalcanal Diary found themselves in need of a baby-faced youth to play a callow marine private, Jaeckel was given a screen test. Despite his initial reluctance to play-act, Jaeckel accepted the Guadalcanal Diary assignment and remained in films for the next five decades, appearing in almost 50 movies and playing everything from wavy-haired romantic leads to crag-faced villains. Between 1944 and 1948, Jaeckel served in the U.S. Navy. Upon his discharge, he co-starred in Sands of Iwo Jima with John Wayne and Forrest Tucker. In 1971, Jaeckel was nominated for a "Best Supporting Actor" Oscar on the strength of his performance in Sometimes a Great Notion. Richard Jaeckel has also been a regular in several TV series, usually appearing in dependable, authoritative roles: he was cowboy scout Tony Gentry in Frontier Circus (1962), Lt. Pete McNeil in Banyon (1972), firefighter Hank Myers in Firehouse (1974), federal agent Hank Klinger in Salvage 1 (1979), Major Hawkins in At Ease (1983) (a rare -- and expertly played -- comedy role), and Master Chief Sam Rivers in Supercarrier (1988). From 1991-92, Jaeckel played Lieutenant Ben Edwards on the internationally popular series Baywatch. Jaeckel passed away at the Motion Picture & Television Hospital of an undisclosed illness at the age of 70.

Trivia: Dour, lantern-jawed character actor John Anderson attended the University of Iowa before inaugurating his performing career on a Mississippi showboat. After serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, Anderson made his Broadway bow, then first appeared on screen in 1952's The Crimson Pirate. The actor proved indispensable to screenwriters trafficking in such stock characters as The Vengeful Gunslinger, The Inbred Hillbilly Patriarch, The Scripture-Spouting Zealot and The Rigid Authority Figure. Anderson's many screen assignments included used-car huckster California Charlie in Psycho (1960), the implicitly incestuous Elder Hammond in Ride the High Country (1962), the title character in The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977) and Caiaphas in In Search of Historic Jesus (1980). A dead ringer for 1920s baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Anderson portrayed that uncompromising gentleman twice, in 1988's Eight Men Out and the 1991 TV biopic Babe Ruth. A veteran of 500 TV appearances (including four guest stints on The Twilight Zone), John Anderson was seen as FDR in the 1978 miniseries Backstairs in the White House, and on a regular basis as Michael Spencer Hudson in the daytime drama Another World, Virgil Earp in The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61) and the leading man's flinty father in MacGiver (1985-92).

Trivia: Avery was a versatile American character actor onscreen from 1956, beginning with The Harder They Fall.

Trivia: Black lead actress Sheila Frazier first appeared onscreen in the '70s.

Trivia: A one-time boxer and a veteran of the Vietnam War, actor Paul Le Mat made a career out of playing gruff, rugged male characters. After attending San Diego City College, Cypress Junior College, Chapman College, and L.A. Valley College following graduation from Newport Harbor High School, the New Jersey native became a war hero after winning a National Defense Medal, a Vietnam Service Medal, and a George Washington Honor Medal for his heroic wartime actions. Though he considered a career in the ring after winning the L.A. Diamond Belt and Southern Pacific Boxing Championship in the early '70s, Le Mat decided on a less physically-intensive career path, and studied acting at the Mitchell Ryan Actors' Studio and San Francisco's American Conservatory Theater. His role as a tire-squealing drag racer in George Lucas' American Graffiti earned the actor a Most Promising Newcomer award at the 1974 Golden Globe Awards, but Le Mat's star waned after a memorable role as a CB coordinator in Jonathan Demme's Handle With Care (1977). He reprised his American Graffiti role in the film's 1979 sequel, but after appearing in Demme's underappreciated Melvin and Howard and a menacing, Golden Globe-winning performance in the harrowing domestic drama The Burning Bed, good parts became scarce. By the 1990s, Le Mat's roles had gone from leading to supporting, and aside from American History X (1998), most of his roles were in bottom-of-the-barrel, B-grade schlock. Genre fans still relished in his performances in such fare as Grave Secrets and Puppet Master (both 1989), but the most exposure Le Mat received in the '90s was his role as the mayor in the Western series Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years. In 2001, Le Mat received his most substantial dramatic role in years as the best friend to a troubled Vietnam veteran in Arliss Howard's Big Bad Love.

Trivia: Wide-shouldered American actor Michael Lerner has become a Rod Steiger for the '90s, specializing in portraying brusque bullies with above-average intelligence. For many years a professor of literature at San Francisco State College, Lerner turned to acting in the late '60s, making his film bow with 1970's Alex in Wonderland. He alternated his movie work with stage appearances at the American Conservatory Theatre. Michael Lerner's more notable film roles include Arnold Rothstein in Eight Men Out (1988) and a Louis Mayer-clone movie producer (for which he was Oscar nominated) in Barton Fink (1991).

Trivia: Joshua Shelley was one of the more enduring victims of Hollywood's blacklist, a fate that overtook him almost as soon as he'd made his big-screen debut. A New York native who began performing at the age of four (when he recited Lincoln's Gettysburg Address at a Brooklyn department store), he became a vaudeville bandleader while attending New York University (also working, in time, as a student journalist), and played in some touring shows before the war. Shelley was drafted in 1942 and served in a special services unit attached to the Tenth Mountain Division. After World War II, he was cast in the musical-fantasy One Touch of Venus, playing three roles in the stage production. In 1948, he was in the cast of Make Mine Manhattan, a hit stage revue written by Shelley's former NYU classmate Arnold B. Horwitt, with Oskar Homolka, Jessie Royce Landis, and Nancy Walker. Shelley's biggest role on stage during this period, however, was as Ozzie in On The Town (the part that Jules Munshin played in the movie). During the late '40s, Shelley also made hundreds of appearances on radio in dramatic roles, on programs such as Dick Tracy, Counterspy, and This Is Your F.B.I., and on early television, primarily in dramatic vehicles, including the ABC anthology series Actors' Studio. He also later served as a disc jockey on WINS. Shelley came to Hollywood in 1949, making his debut in the Universal Pictures college musical Yes Sir, That's my Baby (a sort of poor man's Good News). It was his second movie, however, in the role of Crazy Parrin in Maxwell Shane's City Across the River, that should have put Shelley on the map. He played a character who was both pathetic and terrifying: Crazy is a mildly retarded member of the street gang the Dukes, one minute vulnerable and exploited by the men and women around him, the next a knife-wielding would-be killer tormenting anyone, male or female, that he thinks has crossed him or the gang. Shelley gave the performance of a lifetime -- dominating every scene he is in from the opening shot -- but he was to reap precious little reward for it. He was named as a Communist after the movie's release, and that was to be his last film for more than 15 years. Shelley, who had played hundreds of radio and television parts, found the broadcast media closed to him as well, and he returned to theatrical work during the 1950s. Some of those theater projects were, themselves, fairly controversial and challenging, including the musical I Want You, staged by satirist Theodore J. Flicker (later the director of the films The Troublemaker and The President's Analyst). Later there were again television series like Barney Miller and Phoenix 55, a satire of the '50s middle class starring Shelley, Harvey Lembeck, and Nancy Walker. In the summer of 1955, Shelley was one of a group of witnesses (also including Lee Hays of the Weavers) called to testify before hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, investigating supposed Communist infiltration of the entertainment industry. He never gave up on his career, despite the harassment that cut short his film and television work, and by the early '60s Shelley had re-emerged as a director, first on stage and then, as the influence of the Red Scare vanished, on television and in movies; he directed the extremely funny pilot to an unsold series called The Freudian Slip, written and created by Woody Allen, and co-directed the feature film release of The Perils of Pauline, starring Pat Boone and Pamela Austin. As an actor, he appeared in All The President's Men, Funny Lady, Billy Wilder's version of The Front Page, such TV movies as Kojak: The Marcus Nelson Murders, the mini-series Loose Change, and on series such as All In The Family and Kojak. He was also active as a director, on episodes of The Odd Couple, among other sitcoms. Shelley also gave a major supporting performance in Martin Ritt's comedy-drama about the blacklist era, The Front, starring Woody Allen and a cast of ex-blacklistees. In addition, he became a well-known teacher during the 1970s, and ironically, given the years of blacklisting, was given responsibility for training new acting talent at Columbia Pictures during the late '70s, in an attempt to revive the old Hollywood notion of contract players at the studio. Steven Spielberg and Martin Ritt were among the filmmakers who appeared as guest instructors under the program. Shelley died in his sleep, of a heart attack, early in 1990.

Trivia: At the outset of the 1970s, a teenaged DeWayne Jessie had a promising start to an acting career, just at the point when gifted young black performers were getting more work than ever before. But after eight years of steady screen work and small but enlarging supporting roles, he was sidetracked by a part so unexpectedly big in a movie so unexpectedly successful, that in the 25 years since, he's only appeared in five more movies, but never lacked for work as a performer on-stage, growing out of that movie. In 1978, Jessie was cast in National Lampoon's Animal House in the role of Otis Day, leader of Otis Day & the Knights, who are seen performing "Shout" and "Shama Lama Ding Dong" in two key scenes -- ever since then, like Clayton Moore donning the mask of the Lone Ranger in 1949 and never getting too far from it, DeWayne Jessie has worked regularly as the leader of Otis Day & the Knights. Ironically, Jessie's most prominent role before National Lampoon's Animal House was probably in The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings, in which he played Rainbow, a ball player in the Negro Leagues who is mute. Born in 1953, Jessie made his screen debut at age 17 as a high-school student who is unable to read in the topical drama Halls of Anger (1970), directed by Paul Bogart and starring Jeff Bridges. He had an uncredited role in The New Centurions (1972) and bounced between television and films over the next few years, guest starring in episodes of series such as Love American Style, Kojak, Starsky and Hutch, and Laverne & Shirley, interspersed with small feature roles in Darktown Strutters, Car Wash, and Fun With Dick and Jane. The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings earned him good reviews for a portrayal as poignant as it was inspiring, and earned Jessie an Image Award from the NAACP as Best Supporting Actor. In 1978, he appeared in two movies, one the abominable Thank God It's Friday and the other National Lampoon's Animal House (which earned over 70 million dollars on its first-run release), playing Otis Day, a part that he almost turned down. Within weeks of the movie's opening, he was seeing positive repercussions from his performance, despite the fact that one of his two featured songs, "Shama Lama Ding Dong," was dubbed using the voice of singer Lloyd Williams -- the actor's main contribution in his all-important second scene was his physical presence and the announcement, "It feels so good to be back here at the Dexter Lake Club. We'd like to do a tune entitled "Shama Lama Ding Dong." So hit it." But he looked so good doing it, and fronting the band (which included a young, pre-stardom Robert Cray), that he started getting offers to perform as Otis Day. It took a little time before Jessie actually took the Otis Day & the Knights show on the road, but by 1982, he was a top attraction at frat dances, college-town clubs, and other venues catering to students who'd seen or knew of the movie -- and there were tens of millions of them. Twenty-one years later (a testament to the movie's lingering appeal and constant renewal of its audience, as well as Jessie's skills as a performer), he was still at it, even appearing at B.B. King's in New York. He's been working on-stage as Otis Day longer than he worked onscreen as DeWayne Jessie -- his last movie role was in D.C. Cab in 1983, 13 years into his career. But he made it into the documentary accompanying the 2003 DVD re-release of Animal House, playing (surprise) Otis Day.