Trivia: American actress Jennifer Grey grew up among the sort of people who'd be her co-workers later in life. She was the granddaughter of comedian Mickey Katz and the daughter of Broadway star Joel Grey and actress Jo Wilder. Childhood dance lessons helped her get a start dancing in television commercials. After spending time with the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater in New York, Grey appeared in the off-Broadway production Album. More theatrical experience followed. Grey made her screen debut in the 10th-billed role of Cathy Bennario in the 1984 romantic drama Reckless. That year, she also played small roles in The Cotton Club and Red Dawn. Her first real break came when she played Matthew Broderick's sister in the hit teen comedy Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986). Grey followed up that success with an even bigger one starring opposite Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing (87): coincidentally, the film was set in a Catskill Mountains resort, the same kind of establishment where Grey's father and grandfather began their careers. Though her performance won her accolades, Grey subsequently experienced the all too common difficulty that many teen actors faced, attempting to enter the ream of adult acting. She would appear in a handful of films like Bloodhounds of Broadway (1989) and Portraits of a Killer (1996), before finding her footing with films like Bounce and Redbelt, as well as TV series like It's Like You Know, John from Cincinnati, and The New Adventures of Old Christine.

Trivia: An athlete practically from birth, Patrick Swayze was a football player in high school and then earned a gymnastics scholarship to pay for college. His father had been a dancer/choreographer, and Swayze began to study dance early on, eventually working with the prestigious Harkness and Joffrey Ballet companies. He made his professional debut as a dancer with the lead role of Prince Charming in a traveling company of Disney on Parade, but an old knee injury from his football days threatened to cut his dancing career short at any moment. Hedging his bets, Swayze opened his repertoire up to acting and made the transition to Broadway, landing the role of Danny in the hit musical Grease before heading to Los Angeles to make yet another transition, this time to the screen.Swayze cut his teeth on TV guest appearances, scoring a memorable role as a dying soldier in an episode of M*A*S*H. Finally, he got a role in Francis Ford Coppola's youth ensemble film The Outsiders (1983), a film of massive critical acclaim and box-office success. Steadily continuing his upward trajectory, he followed The Outsiders with the Cold War classic Red Dawn (1984) and with the Civil War TV miniseries North and South (1985). His real big break came in 1987, however, with a starring role in the hit Dirty Dancing. The film gave Swayze the chance to showcase both his acting and dancing abilities and, additionally, he wrote and performed one of the film's songs, "She's Like the Wind," which went on to become a major hit. The role made Swayze an undisputed star, and he scored big again with a tough-guy role in the movie Road House, as well as the romantic lead in the supernatural drama Ghost (1990), a box-office smash that ended up grossing more than $200 million.The '90s had started out for Swayze with a bang, but with so much of his success wrapped up in the films of the 1980s, the actor soon found himself fighting against the mentality that he was out of date. He found iconic roles like surfer Bodhi in the police thriller Point Break and even played a drag queen in 1995's To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, but transitioning into the next phase of his career proved challenging. In 2001, Swayze found a film to help him facilitate this change with the role of twisted self-help guru Jim Cunningham in the dark mystery drama Donnie Darko. There was an element of self-parody in Swayze's portrayal of the über-positive, deceptively clean-cut Cunningham, and audiences found the role refreshing. He continued to pick up projects as they appealed to him, appearing in everything from the romantic drama One Last Dance to the quirky British comedy Keeping Mum.Sadly, however, by the late 2000s some upsetting news arrived. Swayze announced to the press in March 2008 that he was suffering from inoperable stage IV pancreatic cancer. The star battled his illness for a reported 20 months, but in the end it took his life. He died at the relatively young age of 57 in September 2009.

Trivia: Jerry Orbach often commented, without false modesty, that he was fortunate indeed to have been a steadily working actor since the age of 20. Such was an understatement: graced with not only formidable dramatic instinct but one of American theater's top singing voices, Orbach resisted others' attempts to peg him as a character actor time and again and established himself as one of the most unique talents in entertainment per se. Television producer Dick Wolf perhaps put it best when he described Orbach as "a legendary figure of 20th century show business" and "one of the most honored performers of his generation."A native of the Bronx, Orbach was born to an ex-vaudevillian father who worked full time as a restaurant manager and a mother who sang professionally on the radio. The Orbachs moved around constantly during Jerry's youth, relocating from Gotham to Scranton to Wilkes-Barre to Springfield, Massachusetts and eventually settling in Chicago - a mobility that gave the young Orbach an unusual ability to adapt to any circumstance or situation, and thus presaged his involvement in drama. Orbach later attended Northwestern University, trained with Herbert Berghof and Lee Strasberg, and took his Gotham theatrical bow in 1955, as an understudy in the popular 1955 revival of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera, eventually playing the lead role of serial killer Macheath. During the Threepenny run, Orbach made his first film appearance in the Manhattan-filmed low budgeter Cop Killer (1958). In 1960, Orbach created the role of flamboyant interlocutor El Gallo in the off-Broadway smash The Fantasticks, and later starred in such Broadway productions as Carnival (1961), Promises Promises (1966), Chicago (1975) and 42nd Street (1983). By day, Orbach made early-1960s appearances in several New York-based TV series, notably The Shari Lewis Show. In the early years, Orbach's film assignments were infrequent, but starting around 1981, with his pivotal role as officer Gus Levy in Sidney Lumet's masterful urban epic Prince of the City, the actor generally turned up in around one movie per year. His more fondly remembered screen assignments include the part of Jennifer Grey's father in Dirty Dancing (1987), Martin Landau's shady underworld brother in Woody Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) the voice of the Chevalieresque candellabra in the Disney cartoon feature Beauty and the Beast (1990), and Billy Crystal's easily amused agent in Mr. Saturday Night (1992). Orbach perhaps made his most memorable contribution to television, however. After headlining a brief, short-lived detective series entitled The Law and Harry McGraw from September 1987 to February 1988 (a spinoff of Murder, She Wrote), Orbach landed a role that seemed to draw heavily from his Prince of the City portrayal: Detective Lennie Briscoe, a sardonic, mordant police investigator on Wolf's blockbuster cop drama Law & Order.Orbach carried the assignment for twelve seasons, and many attributed a large degree of the program's success to him.Jerry Orbach died of prostate cancer at the age of 69 on December 28, 2004. Three years later, Orbach turned up, posthumously, on subway print advertisements for the New York Eye Bank. As a performer with nearly perfect vision, he had opted to donate his eyes to two women after his death - a reflection on the remarkable humanitarian ideals that characterized his off-camera self.

Trivia: Tennessee native Cynthia Rhodes got her start in show business at Opryland USA in the 1970s while she was still in high school. A capable singer, actress, and dancer, she soon began appearing in dance-centric movies like Xanadu, Flashdance, Staying Alive, and Dirty Dancing. She also became a popular face in music videos, like Toto's "Roseanna" and "Don't Mean Nothing" by singer/songwriter Richard Marx, whom she later married.

Trivia: Born Jack Weinstein, he began training for the stage at the Cleveland Playhouse at age ten. Weston dropped out of school at 15, working occasionally as a stage actor before serving in World War Two; during the war he often performed with the USO. At war's end he moved to New York and studied at the American Theater Wing, meanwhile working in odd jobs. In 1950 he began getting featured roles on Broadway and TV, then entered movies in 1958; with intermittent breaks, he remained busy in films throughout the next three decades. In the mid '70s he gained new popularity as the star of Neil Simon's play California Suite. He married actress Marge Redmond.

Trivia: Many know actress Jane Brucker for the role of older sister Lisa in the '80s classic Dirty Dancing. Originally from Virginia, Brucker studied at the North Carolina School of the Arts before going pro, making some minor TV appearances before landing the role of Lisa. She would go on to appear in a handful of other projects over the coming years, but became less and less involved in on-camera acting as the years went by, gradually becoming more involved in screenwriting.

Trivia: An award-winning stage actress, Kelly Bishop occasionally dabbles in television and feature films. Bishop's accolades, a Tony and a Drama Desk award, came from her outstanding work in the original Broadway version of A Chorus Line. Her television work includes two stints on the television soap opera One Life to Live (she played Serena Wyman in 1989, Dr. Robbins in 1996) and guest-starring roles on Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Her film credits include Six Degrees of Separation ([1993] she also appeared in the original stage version), Miami Rhapsody (1995), and Private Parts (1997), in which Bishop played the mother of shock jock Howard Stern. At the beginning of the 21ast century she enjoyed long run as Emily Gilmore on the TV series Gilmore Girls, and five years after that show ended she returned to the big screen with a part in the comedy Friends With Kids.

Trivia: Lonny Price has had an impressive run in film and television, but he's had even more success on-stage. Born in 1959, the New York native began appearing in off-Broadway and Broadway plays right out of high school, eventually moving his talents backstage as a director, winning accolades for his productions of The Education of H* Y* M* A* N K* A* P* L* A* N, The Rothschilds, Juno, Urban Cowboy, and others. Price also made many small appearances on TV and in film over the years, most notably appearing as Neil Kellerman in Dirty Dancing.

Trivia: Many know actor Max Cantor for the role of Robbie Gould in the '80s classic Dirty Dancing. The son of theater producer Arthur Cantor, the young thespian studied at the Collegiate School and the Buxton School, and Harvard, and wrote for the Village Voice before pursuing a professional career on-screen. In addition to the memorable role in Dirty Dancing, Cantor appeared in the early Todd Solondz film Fear, Anxiety & Depression in 1989. Sadly, Cantor later struggled with heroin addiction and died of a drug overdose in 1991 at the age of 32.

Trivia: Versatile American character actor Wayne Knight has been frequently on stage, screen and television since the late 1970s. In the early '80s, he temporarily left acting (after appearing over 1,000 times in the play Gemini) to become a private detective. In 1986, Knight returned to film in The Sex O'Clock News. He has worked with a number of distinguished directors including Oliver Stone, Kenneth Branagh and Steven Spielberg playing roles ranging from comics to villains. On television, he is best known for playing the oily, self-serving postman Newman on the long-running sitcom Seinfeld, and Officer Don on the outworldly comedy Third Rock From the Sun.

Trivia: A character actress of stage and screen, Paula Trueman first appeared in Broadway revues during the 1920s. Proving herself to be a versatile performer, at home in dramas, comedies, and musicals, Trueman made her first feature film appearance in Crime Without Passion (1934). Her film career lasted until the mid-'80s and was as diverse as her stage work.

Trivia: Character actor Gary Goodrow first appeared onscreen in the '60s.

Trivia: Radio personality Bruce "Cousin Brucie" Morrow began his radio career with a short stint as a DJ in Bermuda before returning to his home state of New York in 1960, just in time for the rock & roll craze to hit the radio scene. Using his show to shine a light on up-and-coming acts from the burgeoning Motown, rock, surf, and other genres, Cousin Brucie became a massively popular DJ among teenagers. He would continue to be one of the most well-known and respected voices on the airwaves for decades to come, always moving with the times, and eventually taking up a slot on Sirius-XM Satellite Radio.

Trivia: Character actor Antone Pagan landed his first big break under the aegis of Ivan Reitman, as one of the training recruits in the 1981 Bill Murray comedy Stripes. He followed it up with minor roles and bit parts in such features as Dirty Dancing (1987) and Hangin' with the Homeboys (1991), and occasional guest appearances on series such as New York Undercover and Law & Order. In 2007, Pagan signed for one of the lead roles in Mulberry Street -- a natural horror opus about a plague sweeping New York City and turning Manhattanites into carnivorous, rat-like creatures.