Trivia: The son of Yugoslav immigrants, Karl Malden labored in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana before enrolling in Arkansas State Teachers College. While not a prime candidate for stardom with his oversized nose and bullhorn voice, Malden attended Chicago's Goodman Dramatic School, then moved to New York, where he made his Broadway bow in 1937. Three years later he made his film debut in a microscopic role in They Knew What They Wanted (1940), which also featured another star-to-be, Tom Ewell. While serving in the Army Air Force during World War II, Malden returned to films in the all-serviceman epic Winged Victory (1944), where he was billed as Corporal Karl Malden. This led to a brief contract with 20th Century-Fox -- but not to Hollywood, since Malden's subsequent film appearances were lensed on the east coast. In 1947, Malden created the role of Mitch, the erstwhile beau of Blanche Dubois, in Tennessee Williams' Broadway play A Streetcar Named Desire; he repeated the role in the 1951 film version, winning an Oscar in the process. For much of his film career, Malden has been assigned roles that called for excesses of ham; even his Oscar-nominated performance in On the Waterfront (1954) was decidedly "Armour Star" in concept and execution. In 1957, he directed the Korean War melodrama Time Limit, the only instance in which the forceful and opinionated Malden was officially credited as director. Malden was best known to TV fans of the 1970s as Lieutenant Mike Stone, the no-nonsense protagonist of the longrunning cop series The Streets of San Francisco. Still wearing his familiar Streets hat and overcoat, Malden supplemented his income with a series of ads for American Express. His commercial catchphrases "What will you do?" and "Don't leave home without it!" soon entered the lexicon of TV trivia -- and provided endless fodder for such comedians as Johnny Carson. From 1989-92, Malden served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Trivia: Major star and producer, and member of one of Hollywood's most prominent families to boot, Michael Douglas was born to movie icon Kirk Douglas and British actress Diana Dill on September 25, 1944, in New Brunswick, NJ. From the age of eight he was raised in Connecticut by his mother and a stepfather, but spent time with his father during vacations from military school. It was while on location with his father that the young Douglas began learning about filmmaking. In 1962, he worked as an assistant director on Lonely Are the Brave, and was so taken with the cinema that he passed up the opportunity to study at Yale for that of studying drama at the University of California at Santa Barbara. At one point he and actor/director/producer Danny De Vito roomed together, and have remained friends ever since. Douglas also studied drama in New York for a while, and made his film debut as an actor playing a pacifist hippie draft evader who decides to fight in Vietnam in Hail Hero! (1969). He appeared in several more dramas, notably Summertree (1971). In 1972, he was cast as volatile rookie police inspector Steve Keller on The Streets of San Francisco. Douglas appeared in the series and occasionally directed episodes of it through 1976. In 1975, Douglas became one of the hottest producers in Tinseltown when he produced Milos Forman's tour de force adaptation of Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which starred Jack Nicholson in one of his best roles. Originally, Douglas' father Kirk owned the film rights to the story. Having appeared in the Broadway version, the elder Douglas had wanted to star in a film adaptation for years, but had no luck getting it produced. The younger Douglas persuaded his father to sell him the rights and give up the notion of starring in the film. The result: a box-office smash that earned five Oscars, including Best Picture. After this triumph, Douglas resumed acting and began developing his screen persona. His was a decidedly paradoxical persona: though ruggedly handsome with an honest, emotive face reminiscent of his father's, onscreen Douglas retained an oily quality that was unusual in someone possessing such physical characteristics. He became known for characters that were sensitive yet arrogant and had something of a bad-boy quality. Through the '70s, Douglas appeared in more films, most notably The China Syndrome, which he also produced. In 1984, Douglas teamed with Kathleen Turner to appear in Romancing the Stone, an offbeat romantic adventure in the vein of Indiana Jones. Co-starring old friend Danny De Vito, it was a major box-office hit and revitalized Douglas' acting career, which had started to flag. Turner, Douglas and De Vito re-teamed the following year for an equally entertaining sequel, The Jewel of the Nile. It was in 1987 that Douglas played one of his landmark roles, that of a reprehensible yuppie who pays a terrible price for a moment's weakness with the mentally unbalanced Glenn Close in the runaway hit Fatal Attraction. The performance marked Douglas' entrance into edgier roles, and that same year he played an amoral corporate raider in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, for which he earned his first Oscar as an actor. In 1989, Douglas reunited with Kathleen Turner to appear in Danny De Vito's War of the Roses, one of the darkest ever celluloid glances at marital breakdown. By the end of the decade, Douglas had become one of Hollywood's most in-demand and highly paid stars. Douglas found success exploring the darker realms of his persona in Black Rain (1989) and the notorious Basic Instinct (1992). One of his darkest and most repugnantly intriguing roles came in 1993's Falling Down, in which he played an average Joe driven to cope with his powerlessness through acts of horrible violence. In 1995, Douglas lightened up to play a lonely, widowed president in The American President, and returned to adventure with 1996's box-office bomb The Ghost and the Darkness. In 1997 he appeared in the David Fincher thriller The Game, and followed that with another behind-the-scenes role, this time as executive producer for the John Travolta/Nicholas Cage thriller Face/Off. Returning to acting in 1998, Douglas starred with Gwyneth Paltrow in A Perfect Murder, a remake of Hitchcock's classic Dial M for Murder. As the new millenium rolled in, Douglas remained a force on screen, most memorably in films like the critically acclaimed Wonder Boys, and Steven Soderbergh's drug-war epic Traffic -- a critical and box office smash. Douglas had other life successes as well, such as his marriage to longtime girlfriend Catherine Zeta-Jones in 2000, and the birth of their subsuquent children. Around this time, Douglas formed a new production company, Further Films. which saw its first wide release in 2001 with the ensemble comedy One Night at McCool's. In 2003 he made It Runs in the Family, a comedy concerning three generations of a dysfunctional family attempting to reconcile their longtime differences. Fiction reflected reality in the film due to the involvement of father Kirk and son Cameron portraying, conveniently enough, Michael's father and son respectively. The 2010's would see Douglas playing roles in films like The Sentinel , King of California, You, Me and Dupree, and the long awaited sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. In 2013, he played Liberace in the HBO TV movie Behind the Candelabra, which earned Douglas an Emmy award.

Trivia: Though frequently cast in Jewish roles, actor Michael Constantine was actually of Greek extraction. The son of a steel worker, Constantine studied acting with such prominent mentors as Howard DaSilva. The prematurely balding Constantine was playing character roles on and off Broadway in his mid-twenties (he was the Darrow counterpart in the original production of Compulsion), supplementing his income as a night watchman and shooting-gallery barker. In 1959, slightly weary of being ignored by callous Broadway producers and casting directors, Constantine appeared in his first film, The Last Mile (1959), thereby launching a cinematic career that has endured into the mid-1990s. Michael Constantine is perhaps best known for his extensive TV work, notably his four-season (1969-1974) stint as long-suffering high school principal Seymour Kaufman on Room 222 and his starring appearance as night-court magistrate Matthew J. Sirota on the brief 1976 sitcom Sirota's Court.

Trivia: Angular Anglo-Latino actor Gregory Sierra began showing up on screen in 1971 in such films as The Wrath of God. Sierra quickly familiarized himself with TV viewers via his continuing role as Julio Fuentes in the weekly sitcom Sanford and Son. He left Sanford in January of 1975 to accept the part of detective sergeant Chano Amenguale on Barney Miller, a role he held down until the fall of 1976. Next up, Sierra starred as Dr. Tony Menzies on A.E.S. Hudson Street, a 1978 TV comedy that folded after six weeks despite positive critical comment. Two years later, he was cast as South American revolutionary "El Puerco" on the nighttime serial spoof Soap, figuring prominently in the series' up-in-the-air final episode in 1981. Gregory Sierra's more recent television roles have included Lt. Victor Maldonado on the NBC sci-fier Something is Out There (1988), and the ill-fated Lt. Lou Rodriguez on the trendy 1980's cop show Miami Vice.

Trivia: Born Ina Rosenberg, Balin is a tall, slim brunette with the looks of a warm-hearted runway model. She debuted in the '50s on the Perry Como TV show, leading to work on Broadway in Compulsion and A Majority of One. Discovered by Hollywood producers, she made her film debut as Anthony Quinn's daughter in The Black Orchid (1959). In 1961 Balin was voted International Star of Tomorrow by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, by which time she was considered one of 20th Century Fox's most promising young talents. She later left the studio; her career never achieved the heights of her early promise. Balin toured Vietnam in 1970 with a U.S.O. show; there she visited An Lac, a Saigon orphanage. Her association with An Lac led her to be among the ground personnel helping to evacuate Vietnamese and Asian-American orphans at war's end in 1975, after which she adopted three of the children. This experience was dramatized in The Children of An Lac (1980), a TV movie in which Balin played herself.

Trivia: Sensitive stage and film leading man John Kerr was able to pass as a teenager well into his 20s. Kerr made his Broadway debut in the high-school comedy Bernardine (1953). Two years later, he scored a huge success in the role of emotionally overwrought, sexually ambivalent college freshman Tom Robinson Lee in Robert Anderson's play Tea and Sympathy; he brilliantly repeated this role in the watered-down 1956 film version. Kerr's only other film roles of note were the doomed Lieutenant Cable in South Pacific (1958) and the imperiled victim of torture-prone Vincent Price in The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). After portraying district attorneys in two separate TV series, Arrest and Trial (1963) and Peyton Place (1966), Kerr evidently decided he enjoyed the world of jurisprudence and became a full-time lawyer. John Kerr remained available for the occasional cameo role into the 1980s. He died in 2013 at age 81.

Trivia: Inaugurating his career at the Cleveland Playhouse, American character actor Robert F. Simon made his first Broadway appearance in Clifford Odets' Clash By Night. In 1949, Simon succeeded Lee J. Cobb in the role of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He made his film debut in 1954, spending the next two decades playing a steady stream of generals, doctors, executives and journalists. One of Simon's most prominent film roles was the father of the title character in 1956's The Benny Goodman Story. On television, Simon played bombastic newspaper editor J. Jonah Jameson in the weekly adventure series The Amazing Spider-Man (1977-78), and could also be seen in recurring roles on Saints and Sinners (1961), Bewitched (1964), Custer (1967), Nancy (1970) and MASH (1972-73 season, as General Mitchell).

Trivia: American leading man Larry Pennell kicked off his film career in 1955. Pennell briefly became a TV idol when he co-starred with Ken Curtis in the widely syndicated adventure series Ripcord (1962). He later spoofed his macho image as conceited, image-conscious movie star Dash Riprock on The Beverly Hillbillies. Larry Pennell kept busy into the 1990s in character roles and cameos, most memorably as Clark Gable in the 1980 TV movie Marilyn: The Untold Story.