Trivia: Both a member of Hollywood royalty and the Brat Pack, Emilio Estevez had the odds (and the press) against him when it came to forging a long-term career in show business. Yet, though he did become the butt of many jokes, Estevez has had the last laugh: he grew up into a prolific, if not acclaimed, actor/writer/director who managed to sidestep the celebrity pratfalls that befell his family and his Brat Pack colleagues.Born in New York on May 12, 1962, Estevez is the eldest son of actor Martin Sheen (formerly known as Ramon Estevez) and his wife, Janet. He grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side with his two younger brothers, Ramon and Charlie, and his younger sister, Renée. Though Estevez started attending school in the New York public-school system, he transferred to a prestigious private academy once his father's career blossomed. In 1968, after Sheen landed a starring role in Catch-22 (1970), the family moved west to Malibu, CA. There, the young Estevez began writing short stories and poems. By the time he turned eight, he had already submitted a script to Rod Serling's Night Gallery television series (it was, unfortunately, rejected).When Estevez was 11, his father bought the family a portable movie camera. Estevez, his brother Charlie, and their friends, Sean and Chris Penn, and Chad and Rob Lowe, used it to make short films, which Estevez would often write. He then began acting in all the junior-high-school plays, including The Dumb Waiter, Hello Out There, and Bye, Bye, Birdie. While accompanying his father to the Philippine set of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), Estevez got his first professional acting role as a messenger boy in the film. His scene, however, did not make the picture's final cut. After returning home to attend Santa Monica High School, Estevez grew interested in sports and did not become involved with the drama department until his senior year. Uninspired by the usual high-school productions, he wrote an original play and drafted Sean Penn to direct it. Titled Echoes of an Era, the story was based on the life of a Vietnam vet whom Estevez met while staying in the Philippines. Around the same time, he landed his first professional stage role opposite his father in Mr. Roberts at the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater in Jupiter, FL.Estevez made his small-screen debut right after graduating from high school. He appeared in the ABC Afterschool Special Seventeen Going on Nowhere (1980) before joining his father in the cast of To Climb a Mountain (1981), an installment of the religious television series Insight. In 1981, after returning from India where he served as his father's stand-in during the taping of Gandhi (1982), Estevez landed his first feature-film role opposite Matt Dillon in Tex (1982). The film marked the first of three adaptations of S.E. Hinton's books in which Estevez would appear. A year later, he starred in Francis Ford Coppola's unforgettable adaptation of Hinton's novel The Outsiders (1983), with Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe, C. Thomas Howell, and Ralph Macchio.By 1983, Estevez found himself on the short list of young actors. Oliver Stone asked him to star in his Academy Award-winning Vietnam film Platoon (1986), but the director could not finance the project in time (Estevez's brother, Charlie, took the role five years later). Instead, Estevez decided to play a punk rocker-turned-car repossessor in Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984). Co-executive produced by former Monkee Mike Nesmith, the wacky comedy also starred cult favorite Harry Dean Stanton and was a lasting underground hit. Estevez next gave a successful reading for John Hughes' The Breakfast Club (1985), a film about five very different high-school kids who are forced to spend a Saturday together in detention. Judd Nelson, Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald, and Ally Sheedy rounded out the cast in what turned out to be the quintessential teen-angst film of the '80s.On the set of The Breakfast Club, Estevez refined a screenplay he had begun writing with Tom Cruise while working on The Outsiders. Based on another S.E. Hinton novel, That Was Then...This Is Now (1985) went into production under the auspices of Paramount and director Christopher Cain, with Estevez as its star. It opened to scathing reviews and little praise for its young writer, but was a moderate box-office success.Estevez's next role featured him as a recent college graduate opposite Rob Lowe, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, and Mare Winningham in St. Elmo's Fire (1985). The film debuted at the same time as a New York magazine cover story that labeled its actors (many of whom had worked together before) as the Brat Pack and elected Estevez as the "unofficial president" of the group. The actor immediately tried to shake the moniker with a part in Stephen King's directing debut, Maximum Overdrive (1986), but the film flopped. He then tried his own hand behind the camera. At age 23, he wrote, directed, and starred in Wisdom (1986), making cinematic history as the youngest feature filmmaker to take on all three roles. The picture, a meandering heist-road film, flopped.Estevez revived his career with Stakeout (1987), a hit action comedy that co-starred veteran actor Richard Dreyfuss, and Young Guns (1988), a successful youth-oriented Western helmed by That Was Then...This Is Now director Christopher Cain. The actor reprised his Young Guns role as Billy the Kid for its sequel, Young Guns 2 (1990), before writing, directing, and starring in Men at Work (1990). The buddy film, a comedy about two garbage men who become wrapped up in a murder case, also featured his brother, Charlie Sheen.After an embarrassing turn in the bizarre sci-fi thriller Freejack (1992), Estevez starred as a lawyer who is forced to coach a children's hockey team in Disney's triumphant The Mighty Ducks (1992). He filmed the spoof National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (1993) and Another Stakeout (1993), before coaching the Mighty Ducks again in D2 (1994). Estevez then agreed to make a cameo appearance in the third installment of the franchise, D3 (1996), if Disney helped finance his own picture, The War at Home (1996). Estevez produced, directed, and starred in the Vietnam-era drama, along with his father and Academy Award winner Kathy Bates. Sadly, after premiering at the Austin Film Festival, The War at Home played in only three cities.In 1998, Estevez made a comeback as the cowboy in the TNT made-for-cable spaghetti Western, Dollar for the Dead. Two years later, he directed Rated X (2000), a Showtime original movie based on brothers Jim and Art Mitchell, the troubled directors of the infamous adult film Behind the Green Door. After casting himself as Jim, Estevez recruited his own brother Charlie to play Art -- a move which gave the heralded film added clout and a moneymaking edge. Its positive press also put both brothers back in the spotlight. Nevertheless, the actor-cum-director maintained a comparatively low profile over the following half-decade, with only a scant few film appearances here and there. 2005 broke the silence, with the release of the live performance film Culture Clash in AmeriCCa -- a documentary record of an infamously acerbic Hispanic-American comedy troupe (Richard Montoya, Ricardo Salinas, Herbert Siguenza). The picture -- which received severely limited distribution (read: only a few theaters across the country) -- went almost straight to video, and the few critics who did see it scourged it as an insult to spectators and to the film's subjects.Despite this and other disappointments on the filmmaker's spotty track record, however, expectations soared for his sixth turn in the director's chair -- which also marked his most ambitious outing to date. The massive period piece/ensemble drama Bobby (2006) darkly recounted -- via a multilayered and multi-plotted script and a massive, Altmanesque ensemble cast to rival even Altman's most impressive assemblages of talent -- the events in Los Angeles' Algonquin Hotel on June 6, 1968, the night Robert F. Kennedy was shot. The cast included William H. Macy, Martin Sheen, Demi Moore, Anthony Hopkins, Sharon Stone, and Elijah Wood. Four years later, Estevez returned to direct the reflective adventure drama The Way, in which he also appeared as the son of his real life father Sheen. The film told the tale of a father who travels overseas to recover his estranged son's body after learning he perished while walking the El camino de Santiago, and ultimately decides to complete his son's pilgrimage.

Trivia: Burly character actor Pat Hingle held down a variety of bread-and-butter jobs--mostly in the construction field--while studying at the University of Texas, the Hagen-Bergdorf studio, the Theatre Wing and the Actors Studio. Earning his Equity card in 1950, Hingle made his Broadway debut in 1953 as Harold Koble in End as a Man (he would repeat this role in the 1957 film adaptation, retitled The Strange One). One year later, he was cast as Gooper-aka "Brother Man"-in Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer-winning play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Also in 1954, he made his inaugural film appearance in On the Waterfront as a bartender. Though a familiar Broadway presence and a prolific TV actor, Hingle remained a relatively unknown film quantity, so much so that he was ballyhooed as one of the "eight new stars" in the 1957 release No Down Payment. As busy as he was before the cameras in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Hingle's first love was the theatre, where he starred in such productions as William Inge's Dark at the Top of the Stairs and Archibald MacLeish's JB, and later appeared in the one-man show Thomas Edison: Reflections of a Genius. His made-for-TV assignments include such historical personages as Colonel Tom Parker in Elvis (1979), Sam Rayburn in LBJ: The Early Years (1988), J. Edgar Hoover in Citizen Cohn (1992) and Earl Warren in Simple Justice (1993). Among his more recent big-screen assignments has been Commissioner Gordon in the Batman films. Amidst his hundreds of TV guest shots, Pat Hingle has played the regular roles of Chief Paulton in Stone (1980) and Henry Cobb in Blue Skies (1988), was briefly a replacement for Doc (Milburn Stone) on the vintage western Gunsmoke, and has shown up sporadically as the globe-trotting father of Tim Daly and Steven Weber on the evergreen sitcom Wings.

Trivia: Lead actress, onscreen from 1981.

Trivia: Yeardley Smith is unarguably the keeper of one of Hollywood's most distinctive-sounding and instantly recognizable set of vocal chords; the Emmy-winning actress' most famous role is without question that of level-headed, suburban schoolgirl Lisa Simpson on the long-running animated television series The Simpsons. Though most of her live-action roles would come during the mid-'80s with such guilty pleasures as The Legend of Billie Jean and Maximum Overdrive, Smith remained active in front of the camera well into the new millennium with roles in such features as As Good As It Gets and such popular television series as Dharma & Greg. Born in Paris, France, Smith kicked off her acting career at Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage before making the move to Broadway in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing in 1984. A role in the after-school special Mom's on Strike marked the actress' first foray into television, and after graduating to features with a supporting role in the 1985 comedy Heaven Help Us, she gained notable exposure later that same year in the teen drama The Legend of Billie Jean. If the film failed to live up to the hype, Smith's performance (as a somewhat shy teen who discovers her own self-confidence after joining a teenage outlaw on the road) offered a scene-stealing turn that would overflow into the following year's much-maligned horror film Maximum Overdrive. A small supporting role in the 1987 teen comedy Three O'Clock High was quick to follow, and that same year, Smith would step behind the microphone for the role that would change her life. Originally conceived as a series of shorts made to run during The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons proved so popular that it was soon given its very own series. Beginning in 1989, The Simpsons quickly became nothing less than a cultural phenomenon, with brother Bart's rebellious antics quickly making "Don't have a cow, man" the national catch phrase. As popular as the series was initially, few could have foreseen that it would go on to surpass The Flintstones as the longest-running animated prime-time series in the history of television. In the years that followed, Lisa would move to the forefront in many episodes, endearing her to a nation of television viewers. Though Smith would still make the occasional foray into features, with bit roles in City Slickers, Toys, Just Write, and As Good As It Gets, it was her role on The Simpsons that kept her busy throughout the 1990s and into the new millennium.Aside from voicing Lisa Simpson she didn't appear on-screen in the first decade of the 21st century, but she returned with bit parts in movies like HIGH School and New Year's Eve in 2010 and 2011.

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

Trivia: A veteran character actor whose work has shown he's as comfortable with comedy as drama, Frankie Faison was born in Newport News, VA, in 1949. Faison developed the acting bug while in grade school after appearing in a school play, and after high school he was a theater student at both Illinois Wesleyan University and New York University. Faison began pursuing a career in the theater, and appeared in a number of acclaimed off-Broadway productions, including Athol Fugard's Playland, the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of Before It Hits Home, and an adaptation of King Lear at the NYSF Delacorte Theater. Faison made his film debut in 1981 with a small role in Ragtime, and Faison soon began supplementing his stage work with small parts in motion pictures and guest shots on television. An inkling of what was to come for Faison appeared in 1986, when he was cast in a small role as a cop in Manhunter, an adaptation of Thomas Harris' novel Red Dragon, in which Brian Cox played the murderous Hannibal Lector. In 1987, Faison appeared on Broadway in August Wilson's drama Fences, opposite James Earl Jones; Faison's performance earned him a Tony award nomination. In 1988, Faison scored a showy comic role in the Eddie Murphy vehicle Coming to America, and a year later he was one of the "corner men" in Spike Lee's acclaimed and controversial Do the Right Thing. In 1990, Faison scored the male lead in a short-lived sitcom, True Colors, and in 1991 he appeared in another adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel when he was cast as Barney Matthews, the big but gentle male nurse in The Silence of the Lambs. Faison continued to win supporting roles in a variety of notable films, including City of Hope, Sommersby, Mother Night, I Love Trouble, Albino Alligator, Where the Money Is, and The Thomas Crown Affair, and he had a leading role in the well-regarded police drama Prey; sadly, the show fared poorly in the ratings and didn't survive its first season. Faison revived his role as Barney Matthews in 2001's box-office blockbuster Hannibal, making him the only actor to appear in all three films about the famous cannibal. ~ Mark Deming

Trivia: A veteran actor with a charming drawl, South Carolina native Leon Rippy began his acting career in the early '80s, making very minor appearances in very big films, like a store clerk in The Color Purple and an FBI agent in Firestarter. Rippy would continue to appear in several projects over the coming years, often taking on a number of roles every year. He notably played a prosecutor in 1988's Illegally Yours, and an Army sergeant in 1990's Moon 44, one of seven collaborations Rippy would make with director Roland Emmerich. The '90s would find the actor just as active as ever, appearing in the usual plethora of movies and TV shows, including high-profile appearances in 2000's The Patriot and on the series Walker, Texas Ranger. The new millennium would bring even more prominent work for the now silver-haired actor, with a starring role on the HBO western series Deadwood, which Rippy would appear on from 2004 to 2006. He soon took on another starring role on the police drama Saving Grace with Holly Hunter, playing Earl, a tough-talking, tobacco-spitting messenger from God. Although he was away from screens for nearly a half-decade after Saving Grace came to an end, he returned in the Johnny Depp project The Lone Ranger.

Trivia: Versatile American actor Giancarlo Esposito was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, but grew up in Manhattan from the age of six. His mother was an African-American nightclub singer (who once shared a bill with Josephine Baker) and his father was an Italian stagehand. In show business most of his life, Esposito made his Broadway debut in a 1966 production of Maggie Flynn. His other stage credits include Sacrilege, Miss Moffatt, and Balm in Gilead. He won a 1981 Theatre World Award for his performance in Zooman and the Sign.On the big screen, Esposito started appearing in Spike Lee films during the late '80s in a wide range of roles with great character names. He was the frat leader Julian "Big Brother Almighty" in School Daze, the outspoken reactionary Buggin' Out in Do the Right Thing, the dandy pianist Left Hand Lacey in Mo' Better Blues, and the criminal Thomas Hayer in Malcolm X. Esposito's other film roles include an investigative journalist in Bob Roberts, an activist in Amos & Andrew, and a game show host in Reckless. In 1995, he earned an Independent Spirit award nomination for his supporting role of doting drug dealer Esteban in Boaz Yakin's debut drama Fresh. Esposito also appeared in Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's Smoke, along with the sequel Blue in the Face. The next year, he turned briefly to producing with the independent prison film The Keeper, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.On television, Esposito appeared on NYPD Blue, Law & Order, and the short-lived Fox comedy Bakersfield, P.D. In 1999, he earned an Image award nomination for his role as FBI Agent Michael Giardello on Homicide: Life on the Street. He also has contributed to the Fox television dramas The $treet and girls club. While teaching at the Atlantic Theatre Company, Esposito found time to portray real-life figures in the biopics Ali (as Cassius Clay Sr.) and Piñero (as Miguel Algarin). Projects for 2004 included James Hunter's feature Back in the Day and the television movie NYPD 2069. He played a detective in the thriller Derailed, and appeared in the indie drama SherryBaby. In 2008 he directed, starred in, and helped write the drama Gospel Hill. In 2010 he joined the cast of the highly-respected AMC drama series Breaking Bad, and appeared in the 2012 big-screen thriller Alex Cross.

Trivia: Played on the varsity basketball team in high school. In 1983, was the first winner of the Miss Resaca Beach Poster Girl contest, and a runner-up in the Miss Georgia USA Pageant. Made her Broadway debut in The Will Rogers Follies in 1992. Was the coexecutive producer of the 2005 documentary on Native Americans, Whispers in the Wind. Started her own production company, Angel Fire Productions. Released the One World of Love Benefit Album in 2011. Hosts the radio show Awakening With Marla on Contact Talk Radio. Supports the Nu Skin Force for Good Foundation and the Spirituality for Kids Foundation.

Trivia: Stephen King wrote his first short story at seven, and was first published (in a comic fanzine) at 18. After attending the University of Maine, he worked as a sportswriter for his local newspaper and labored away for a while in an industrial laundry. He was teaching high school English at Maine's Hampden Academy when his first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974. Over the next decade he blossomed into the most popular writer in America, as well as one of the most prolific; in addition to the books published under his own name, he also wrote five pseudonymously as Richard Bachman (one of these, The Running Man, was filmed in 1989, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead). No mere hack or dilettante, as has sometimes been alleged, King puts his whole heart and soul in every chiller he writes: His criteria is that if it can scare him, it will scare everyone else. Beginning with 1976's Carrie, virtually all of King's novels have been adapted to the screen -- but only a third or so of the filmizations have been truly worth the effort. For every above-average effort like The Shining (1980), The Dead Zone (1983), and Misery (1990), there has been a failure like Pet Cemetery (1989) and Needful Things (1993). While he claims to have adopted a "take the money and run" philosophy concerning most of his filmed novels, King has, in fact, taken a more active part in movies than most of his contemporaries. He often plays small roles in the films based on his works, and in 1986 he made his directorial bow with Maximum Overdrive. He also directed the first five episodes of the 1991 TV series Stephen King's The Golden Years, and essayed a small role as a bus driver. His other TV contributions have included the miniseries It! (1990), Sometimes They Come Back (1991), The Tommyknockers (1993), The Stand (1994), and The Langoliers (1995). In 1997, King oversaw a television miniseries remake of The Shining to insure that it would be closer to his original vision than the 1980 Kubrick film. Not entirely confined to hair-raisers, Stephen King has also turned out "straight" tales like The Body and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, both of which have been filmed as, respectively, Stand by Me (1986) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994). In the years that followed The Shawshank Redemption drew a massive cult following on home video and DVD, and became on of King's most celebrated celluliod adaptations. Of course this would eventually lead to many more film adaptations of King's more dramatic works, and with such efforts as Dolores Caliborne, The Green Mile and Hearts in Atlantis, King adaptations began to take on an air of sophistication (a great irony considering the author himself has deemed his writings to the literary equivilant of a Big Mac and fries) that attracted the likes of such respected dramatic actors as Tom Hanks and Anthony Hopkins. Of course endless sequels to such earlier adaptations as Sometimes They Come Back and Children of the Corn continued to flood the straight-to-video and lend some air of truth to his statements regarding his work, and it seemed that every few years a miniseries based on one of King's novels was almost mandatory. If a belated 1999 sequel to Brian De Palma's 1976 film adaptation of Carrie seemed little more than an attempt to cash in on the current trend towards post-Scream teen horror, a made-for-television remake of the original in 2002 was simply unnecessary. In 2002 The Dead Zone was adapted into a well-recieved television series, and though such feature efforts as 2003's ambitious but laughably flawed Dreamcather proved that filmmakers were willing to take risks with some of the King's more unconventional stories. After adapting Lars Von Trier's acclaimed Danish television chiller The Kingdom into Kingdom Hospital in 2004, fans could look forward to yet another made-for-television adaptation of Salem's Lot and the David Koepp directed Johnny Depp vehicle Secret Window later that same year. Of course as always the line forming to adapt King novels to screen could last be seen winding around the block, and screen versions of Riding the Bullet, The Talisman, Bag of Bones and Desperation wer all in the making as of early 2004. King's writing would continue to spawn several movie and TV projects per year for the next decade, in everything from short films like Survivor Type, to feature films like Grey Matter, to TV series like Heaven.On a personal note, King suffered massive injuries when struck by a minivan while walking outside in June of 1999, a mere month after announcing that he would likely go blind as a result of being stricken with Macular Degeneration. Though King would eventually recover from the injuries he sustained in the minivan incident, there was little doctors could do to halt the devastating effects of his incurable eye condition and an announcement that he would cease writing in 2002 proved a sad blow to legions of loyal fans.