Trivia: At first intending to become a minister, actor/monologist Andy Griffith (born June 1st, 1926) became active with the Carolina Playmakers, the prestigious drama-and-music adjunct of the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill. He spent several seasons portraying Sir Walter Raleigh in the summertime outdoor drama The Lost Colony, spending the rest of the years as a schoolteacher. Griffith continued performing fitfully as an after-dinner speaker on the men's club circuit, developing hilariously bucolic routines on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to football. Under the aegis of agent/producer Richard O. Linke, Griffith returned to acting, attaining stardom in the role of bumptious Air Force rookie Will Stockdale in the TV and Broadway productions of No Time For Sergeants. Before committing Sergeants to film, Griffith made his movie debut in director Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, in which he portrayed an outwardly folksy but inwardly vicious TV personality (patterned, some say, after Arthur Godfrey).After filming Face in the Crowd, No Time for Sergeants and Onionhead for Warner Bros. during the years 1957 and 1958, Griffith starred in a 1959 Broadway musical version of Destry Rides Again; as an added source of income, Griffith ran a North Carolina supermarket. On February 15, 1960 he first appeared as Andy Taylor, the laid-back sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina, on an episode of The Danny Thomas Show. This one-shot was of course the pilot film for the Emmy-winning The Andy Griffith Show, in which Griffith starred from 1960 through 1968. Eternally easygoing on camera, Griffith, who owned 50% of the series, ruled his sitcom set with an iron hand, though he was never as hard on the other actors as he was on himself; to this day, he remains close to fellow Griffith stars Don Knotts and Ron Howard. An unsuccessful return to films with 1969's Angel in My Pocket was followed by an equally unsuccessful 1970 TV series Headmaster. For the next 15 years, Griffith confined himself to guest-star appearances, often surprising his fans by accepting cold-blooded villainous roles. In 1985, he made a triumphal return to series television in Matlock, playing a folksy but very crafty Southern defense attorney. A life-threatening disease known as Gillian-Barre syndrome curtailed his activities in the late 1980s, but as of 1995 Andy Griffith was still raking in the ratings with his infrequent Matlock two-hour specials. The actor worked on and off throughout the late nineties and early 2000s, and co-starred with Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion in the romantic comedy Waitress in 2007.

Trivia: London-born actress/director/screenwriter Ida Lupino came from a family of performers. She played small parts in Hollywood films through the 1930s until she starred opposite Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra (1941), which led to bigger roles in films of the '40s. Early on, she appeared in Peter Ibbetson (1935), Anything Goes (1936), Artists and Models (1937), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), and The Light That Failed (1939), among others. Later, she appeared in Ladies in Retirement (1941), The Sea Wolf (1941), Life Begins at Eight-Thirty (1942), and Forever and a Day (1943), and continued performing on into the 1960s, but not in major films. Starting with Not Wanted (1949), which she also co-wrote, she became the only female movie director of her time. She specialized in dramatic and suspense films, including Never Fear (1949), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), The Bigamist (1953), and the comedy The Trouble with Angels (1966). She also directed episodes of many television series, including The Untouchables and The Fugitive.

Trivia: After a flurry of stage activity, Brooklyn-born leading man Michael Brandon settled into a leading-man career before the cameras. Brandon's first film appearance was as Mike Vecchio in Lovers and Other Strangers (1970). Perhaps the most notable of his many TV-movie stints was as real-life biographer/confidant William Bast in the 1976 biopic James Dean. Six years later, he showed up as David Marquette, deranged kidnapper of Maud Evans in the never-resolved cliffhanger that closed out the weekly TV series Emerald Point NAS. He was seen to better advantage as Serpico-like Lt. Dempsey in the Anglo-British adventure weekly Dempsey and Makepeace (1985), co-starring with his second wife, Glynis Barber (wife number one was Bionic Woman star Lindsay Wagner). He also played overly sensitive yuppie patriarch Teddy Kramer in the 1992 sitcom Home Fires. Michael Brandon should not be confused with the 1940s utility player of the same name, who, as Archie Twitchell, played the alpaca-coat salesman in Sunset Boulevard (1950).

Trivia: The son of actors John McIntire and Jeanette Nolan, Tim McIntire began his career in his teens, occasionally showing up on his dad's TV series Wagon Train. His first regular weekly TV work was in the role of Bob Younger on the 1966 prime-timer The Legend of Jesse James. Matheson kept busy into the 1980s with a steady stream of small but distinct character roles; he enjoyed a rare starring assignment as rock 'n' roll maven Alan Freed in 1978's American Hot Wax. He wrote the musical score for the 1975 cult favorite A Boy and His Dog, and provided the voice of Blood the dog (one of his many voiceover assignments during this period); he also wrote and performed the music for 1971's Jeremiah Johnson. Tim McIntire died of heart failure at age 43.

Trivia: Character actress, onscreen from 1957.