Trivia: Cloris Leachman seems capable of playing any kind of role, and she has consistently demonstrated her versatility in films and on TV since the 1950s. On the big screen, she can be seen in such films as Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), The Last Picture Show (1971), for which she won an Oscar; and Young Frankenstein (1974). On TV, she played the mother on Lassie from 1957-58, and Phyllis Lindstrom on both The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77) and her own series, Phyllis (1975-77). She was a staple on many of the dramatic shows of the '50s, and a regular on Charlie Wild, Private Detective (1950-52), and The Facts of Life. Leachman has won three Emmy Awards and continues to make TV, stage, and film appearances, including a turn as Granny in the film version of The Beverly Hillbillies (1993) and supplying her voice for the animated Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996) and The Iron Giant (1999). In 1999, she could be seen heading the supporting cast in Wes Craven's Music of the Heart.

Trivia: A former Mouseketeer, Lisa Whelchel is best remembered for playing spoiled, little rich girl Blair Warner on the long-running sitcom Facts of Life (1979-1988).

Trivia: An actress best known as Dorothy "Tootie" Ramsey, the lone African American student and consummate gossip at the exclusive Eastland Preparatory School for Women on NBC's sitcom The Facts of Life (1979-1988), Kim Fields actually appeared on several popular series in the 1970s-2000s. The Big Apple native grew up in a single-parent household and began acting in commercials well before she reached her teens, making her most widely seen appearance on an advertisement for Mrs. Butterworth's syrup. She made her foray into acting with scattered guest appearances on Good Times in 1978 and signed for the Facts of Life role one year later, at the age of 10, when Norman Lear (the producer of both Times and Facts) tapped her for that part. Fields remained with the program for its entire nine-year run, a run that witnessed numerous changes in the show's lineup and format, including the replacement of star Charlotte Rae with Cloris Leachman, and a change of venue in 1985. About five years after Facts folded in 1988, Fields scored her second major coup with a much different multiseason role as Regine Hunter, a loose, money-hungry employee of a clothing boutique on the urban-oriented Queen Latifah sitcom Living Single (1993-1998). Fields spent the following years appearing in scattered features, such as the 2000 telemovie Hidden Blessings and the 2001 telemovie Facts of Life Reunion (which reunited her with several of her ex-costars), and making guest appearances on programs including The Drew Carey Show and The Division; she also took time out to start a family.

Trivia: Of all the "break out" performers from the series The Facts of Life, Mindy Cohn was the most improbable. The others were all child actors with experience in performing, but Cohn never trained as an actress and knew little or nothing about the series when she first came to the attention of the producers. Born in Los Angeles, she was an ordinary high school student attending the Harvard-Westlake School when the makers of The Facts of Life, planning their first season, arrived there to observe and photograph an actual girls' school in operation. It was reportedly series star Charlotte Rae who first spotted Cohn, a student at the school, entertaining some friends, and brought her to the attention of the producers. All involved agreed that she was a "natural," one of those uncanny, untrained individuals who simply looked good and memorable and funny in front of the camera, in a manner comparable to the child performers they had already cast, and with that ability added something extra special in terms of verisimilitude -- and a good deal of wry humor -- to the cast they already had. And so Cohn was cast as Natalie Green and was one of the three original young first-season cast members to get spotlighted when the program moved to its second season, achieving stardom in the course of a seven-season run for the series. One very ironic moment came later in the run of the show when Cohn, who had always been on the heavy side and whose character had been conceived with that as an attribute, began to slim down. According to Cohn, in an interview for the DVD release of the first two seasons, the producers actually asked her to put the weight back on, if possible; when she refused, they came up with a compromise by having her character dress in clothes that made her look like she was still overweight. Since the series ended production, she has somewhat limited her acting work while earning a degree in cultural anthropology. Cohn has specifically taken parts that were devised to capitalize on her work from the series and has still found enough roles to keep her occupied. She has also been extremely busy as a voice artist, including portraying the role of Velma on Scooby-Doo.

Trivia: Fans of the long-running television sitcom Facts of Life (1979-1988) will remember Nancy McKeon as Jo, the tough-talking, golden-hearted girl from Brooklyn who struggled to fit in at a posh girls school, but she has been involved with television, and to some extent, feature films, since she was two years old and cast in a commercial for which her brother, Philip McKeon (he is 18 months older), was auditioning. After shooting the spot, McKeon became a model and even appeared in Sears catalogs. Her brother was also a successful child model. In 1978, nine-year-old McKeon and her father moved to Los Angeles -- her brother was already out there appearing on the popular sitcom Alice (1976-1985) -- but she would not have a successful audition until at age 12, she landed a part on Starsky and Hutch (1975-1979) and then a part in the television movie Return to Fantasy Island (1978). She joined the cast of Facts of Life in its second season and remained until the show's end. While on the show, McKeon frequently appeared in television movies such as Strange Voices (1987). In 1995, McKeon returned to series television with the short-lived sitcom Can't Hurry Love, which she also produced.

Trivia: The offspring of actress Patty Duke and actor/director/writer John Astin and brother of actor Sean Astin, Mackenzie Astin was perhaps destined to be a performer. Born and raised in L.A., Mackenzie began as a child and teen actor on TV in the early 1980s with roles in the TV movie Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal (1982), and the girls' prep-school sitcom The Facts of Life. Astin moved to feature films in the 1990s with a spate of roles in Hollywood studio films, including the lead in the Disney adventure Iron Will (1994). After substantial parts in two high-profile box-office disappointments, Terms of Endearment sequel The Evening Star (1996) and the Sandra Bullock-Chris O'Donnell historical romance In Love and War (1996), Astin focused on work in more idiosyncratic independent films. Astin's boyish good looks made him deceptively "perfect boyfriend" material in the romantic comedy Dream for an Insomniac (1998), and he played a hapless male in the mockumentary Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human (1999). Astin particularly enhanced his indie record with his performance as one of the young preppies negotiating The Last Days of Disco (1998), the final part of Whit Stillman's trilogy dissecting the mating habits of Manhattan's haute bourgeoisie. Astin returned to TV in the late 1990s as shooting victim Kevin McCarthy in the docudrama The Long Island Incident (1998), and in the civil-rights drama Selma Lord Selma (1999).

Trivia: "My name is Orson Bean. Harvard '47, Yale Nothing." Actually, that oft-repeated introduction is a double deception: actor Orson Bean didn't go to Harvard, and his name isn't really Orson Bean. As a boy magician, Dallas Frederick Burrows borrowed the first half of his stage name from another prestidigitator of note, Orson Welles. Bean made his legitimate stage bow in 1945, then worked up a nightclub comedy act which premiered in New York at the now-defunct Blue Angel (in 1954, he hosted a summer-replacement TV series emanating from this celebrated nightspot). Landing on Broadway in the 1953 production Men of Distinction, Bean won a Theatre World Award for his work in the 1954 revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac, and Critics' Circle Awards for his performances in Mister Roberts and Say Darling. His later stage credits included Broadway's Subways are for Sleeping (1962) and Never too Late (1964) not to mention his extensive tours in the Neil Simon-Burt Bacharah musical Promises, Promises. In films from 1955, Bean's best-received screen performance was as the testifying army physician in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959). An inescapable presence on TV, Bean has participated in virtually every quiz show known to man, from the familiar (To Tell the Truth, I've Got a Secret) to the obscure (Laugh Line). He was also a regular as the ineffectual Reverend Brim on the Norman Lear syndicated series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (1977) and Forever Fernword (1978), and more recently was seen on a weekly basis as cranky general store owner Loren Bray on Dr. Quinn, Medicine Women (1993- ). Outside of his showbiz activities, Bean has proven a difficult subject to categorize: blacklisted for his outspoken liberal views in the early 1950s, he was an ardent supporter of Richard M. Nixon in 1968. A man of many interests, Orson Bean was the founder of the arts-oriented 15th Street School of New York, the author of the oddball 1971 volume Me and the Orgon, and one of the charter members of The Sons of the Desert, the famed Laurel & Hardy appreciation society.

Trivia: Comedian and actor Blake Clark grew up in Georgia and fought in the Vietnam War before hitting the small screen in the early 1980s in a string of guest starring spots on shows like M*A*S*H, Moonlighting, and St. Elmo's Fire. During this time, he was also featured in comedy specials on HBO, NBC, and ABC. The roles kept pouring in for the gruff-voiced actor, who landed a regular role on Home Improvement in 1994. He played Tim Taylor's friend Harry, who owned the hardware store where Tim spent much time and money. Clark also had recurring roles on The Drew Carey Show, The Jamie Foxx Show, and Boy Meets World (as Shawn's father, Chet). On the big screen, Clark became a favorite of Adam Sandler and was cast in many of his movies, including The Waterboy, Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds, and 50 First Dates. Clark also replaced the late Jim Varney as the voice of Slinky Dog in 2010's Toy Story 3.

Trivia: Even as a teenaged performer with the Shorewood Players, a Milwaukee community-theatre group, Charlotte Rae thrived in playing characters much older than herself. Example: at 16, Charlotte starred as Dolly Gallegher Levi in a Shorewood production of Thornton Wilder's The Merchant of Yonkers (her 28-year-old "Horace Vandergelder" was future Broadway director Morton DaCosta). Following graduation from Northwestern University, Rae made her Broadway bow in 1952's Three Wishes for Jamie. The following year, she scored a hit as Mrs. Peachum in the long-running off-Broadway revival of Brecht and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera, and within three years she was portraying the ancient, wizened Mammy Yokum in Li'l Abner. She was a favorite of TV producer Nat Hiken, who hired her for several guest spots on The Phil Silvers Show. In 1961, Hiken cast the 35-year-old Charlotte as middle-aged hausfrau Sylvia Schnauzer, virago wife of officer Leo Schnauzer (played by fiftyish Al Lewis) on Car 54, Where are You? Rae's other TV series credits include the 1950s daytime drama From These Roots, the 1975 Norman Lear sitcom Hot L Baltimore and the 1976 Summer replacement The Rich Little Show. In 1978, Rae was cast as flibbertigibbet housekeeper Mrs. Garrett on the Gary Coleman series Diff'rent Strokes; the character struck such a responsive chord with audiences that she was spun off into her own starring sitcom The Facts of Life, in 1986. Rae remained with Facts as Mrs. Garrett until 1986, by which time she had been nominated for two Emmies (she has also received Obie and Tony nominations; an actual win is long overdue). More recently, Charlotte has provided voices for such animated offerings as Tom and Jerry: The Movie (1993) and TV's Itsy Bitsy Spider. An off-and-on nightclub and revue performer, Charlotte Rae took her one-woman "Broadway highlights" show on the road in 1994. Rae would continue to act in the decades to come, providing the voice of Nanny on the 101 Dalmations animated series, and appearing in films like You Don't Mess with the Zohan.