Trivia: One of the salutary byproducts of the TV series Seinfeld is that it created a market in the '90s for sitcoms built around the comedy routines of young, hip New York comics. One of the best of these programs was Mad About You, created by and starring Manhattan-born Paul Reiser. Reiser and Seinfeld share more than a similarity of sitcoms; together with comedians Larry Miller and Mark Schiff, they comprise what has been unofficially dubbed the Four Funniest Men in the World Club, which has met for lunch each New Year's Day for the past several years. Reiser's credentials include a degree from S.U.N.Y.-Binghamton, a short stint as a health food distributor, and a 1982 film debut in Diner. Most of his film roles have been in comedies, though he was effectively cast as a greedy space traveler (who comes to a well-deserved bad end) in 1986's Aliens. Reiser has noted that his weekly series Mad About You, in which he co-starred with Helen Hunt, was based on his relationship with his wife, Paula. In 1995, Paul Reiser took a brief respite from Mad About You to star in the "single dad" comedy Bye Bye Love.As the new decade began, and Mad About You came to a close, Resier appeared in One Night at McCool's, and four years later realized a personal dream by co-starring with Peter Falk in The Thing About My Folks, a film Resier co-wrote as well. He was interviewed in The Aristocrats, and appeared as himself in Funny People. In 2011 he masterminded the very short-lived NBC sitcom The Paul Reiser Show.

Trivia: A precociously talented youngster, Helen Hunt was drawing paychecks as a television actress from the age of ten. Before she was 17, she had appeared as a regular on two series, Swiss Family Robinson (1975) and The Fitzpatricks (1977). Hunt proved she was more than just a workaday child actor with her starring performance in the fact-based 1981 TV movie The Miracle of Kathy Miller, in which she played a high school athlete who overcame severe mental and physical damage brought on by a highway accident. While she had been appearing in films as early as Rollercoaster in 1977, Hunt was never groomed as a star player, and it is possible that her resemblance to another child actress, Jodie Foster, held her back from more important roles.After taking on her first adult role in the 1982 sitcom It Takes Two, Hunt's film assignments improved, with sizable roles in Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Project X (1987), Next of Kin (1989), and The Waterdance (1991). She also gained a small measure of cult status by appearing in a brace of science fiction films, including Trancers II (1991) and Trancers III (1992). That same year, Hunt landed her longest-lasting acting assignment to date, as the co-star of the Paul Reiser-created comedy series Mad About You. During the show's seven-year run, she won both Emmy and Golden Globe awards for her portrayal of Jamie Buchman. In 1996, Hunt had her most successful film role to date in the blockbuster Twister. The following year, she topped that when she received a Best Actress Oscar for playing a caring waitress and single mother who befriends acerbic, obsessive-compulsive author Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson, who also won an Oscar for his performance) in As Good As It Gets. After Mad About You ended in 1999, Hunt appeared in films by several veteran directors, including Robert Zemeckis (Cast Away [2000]), Robert Altman (Dr. T and The Women [2000]), and Woody Allen (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion [2001]). She starred in Life x 3 on Broadway in 2003.In 2005, Hunt joined the star-studded cast of HBO's two-part miniseries Empire Falls in the role of Janine, ex-wife of Miles (Ed Harris), the story's central character. The actress made her feature directorial debut in Then She Found Me (for which Hunt also starred, produced, and wrote the screenplay), an adaptation of Elinore Lipman's best-selling novel of the same name. The story follows a Philadelphia schoolteacher (Hunt) whose long-lost birth mother (Bette Miller) reappears at just as her daughter is careening into a midlife crisis. Hunt played a supportive mother in Soul Surfer (2011), an inspirational drama based on the true tale of a surfer who returned to the sport after tragically losing an arm. In 2012 she played a sex surrogate helping a man in an iron lung lose his virginity for director Ben Lewin in The Sessions, a part that earned her rave reviews and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Trivia: Raised outside of Chicago as the sixth of nine children, including older brother James, a founding member of the band Chicago. Left college in his junior year after seeing David Mamet's play, The American Buffalo, which inspired Pankow to enroll in the two-year training program at Chicago's St. Nicholas Theatre. Performed on Broadway (in his first stint) in Serious Money, The Iceman Cometh and as Mozart in Amadeus. Appeared in a numerous films of the late 1980s-early '90s, including To Live and Die in L.A., Talk Radio and Mortal Thoughts. Most recognized for his role as Ira Buchman, cousin of Paul Reiser's character, on the '90s NBC sitcom Mad About You. Returned to Broadway in the 2000s, performing in Twelve Angry Men, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Cymbeline. Took over the role of Merc Lapidus (from Thomas Haden Church) in 2011 on the Showtime/BBC show Episodes.

Trivia: A natural-born actress who received her primary training in the foyer of her parents' home, Leila Kenzle has since moved on to brighten the lights of Broadway and bask in the warm glow of television and film. Born in Patchogue (Long Island), NY, and raised by an electrical supplies salesman and an antique dealer in nearby Rutherford, NJ, Kenzle was the one of three daughters who often entertained houseguests with her energetic antics. After deciding to expand her talents beyond the realm of home dinner theater, Kenzle earned her B.F.A. in theater from the Mason Gross School of the Arts Conservatory at Rutgers. As with many others in her field, the burgeoning talent found the demanding life of an actress too much to bear and promptly withdrew from the stage, finding work as a hotel phone operator. Encouraged by a sympathetic casting director to follow her dreams and go in for an audition, Kenzle landed her first off-Broadway role and has since never looked back. Following a breakthrough role in the off-Broadway hit Tony 'n Tina's Wedding, the newly confident actress soon relocated to Los Angeles and quickly landed roles in no less than five television pilots. Her television career on a role, Kenzle appeared in such popular series as The Golden Girls, thirtysomething, and Mad About You. Her exposure growing, it wasn't long before Kenzle was making the leap to films with roles in Other People's Money (1991) and Dogmatic (1996). The new millennium found Kenzle landing roles in such popular features as White Oleander and the Rob Schneider comedy The Hot Chick (both 2002). Married to acting coach Neil Monaco in April of 1994, Kenzle often dedicated her time off-camera to work with the Children's International Institute and working with multiple sclerosis charities. With the release of the award-winning short film Bigger Fish, the established actress branched out to receive her first producer's credit.

Trivia: Character actor Richard Kind has done most of his work on television and on stage, but he also occasionally appears in feature films. Fans of the NBC sitcom Mad About You will recognize him for playing Fran's ex-husband Mark. Kind grew up in Bucks County, PA (he was born in Trenton, NJ), and has had a lifelong interest in acting. But despite his interest, he enrolled at Northwestern University as a pre-law major. He had planned on attending law school immediately after graduation, but instead heeded a family friend's advice and decided to pursue drama for a while. Kind moved to New York, but despite occasional work in commercials and showcases, got no breaks. He did much better in Chicago, where he found employment and gained valuable experience working first with the comedic actors at the Practical Theatre Company and then with those at Second City. Eventually, he moved to L.A. to perform with that city's division of the illustrious satirical theater. Since his arrival in Southern California, Kind has been a regular and a guest star on various series. He made his feature film debut in Vice Versa (1988). He would go on to appear in many feature films, from the Station Agent to Argo. He would also star on several TV series, like Spin City and Luck.

Trivia: Actress, comedian, and paragon of cynicism Janeane Garofalo was born on September 28, 1964, in Newton, NJ. During high school, her family relocated to Houston, TX, where the trauma of the move prompted her famously insecure, self-loathing persona to begin blossoming in full. While studying history at Providence College, Garofalo entered a comedy talent search sponsored by the Showtime cable network, winning the title of "Funniest Person in Rhode Island." Dreaming of earning a slot on the writing staff of the Late Night With David Letterman program, she became a professional standup upon graduating college but struggled for a number of years, working briefly as a bike messenger in Boston. Upon moving to the Los Angeles area, Garofalo met actor/comedian Ben Stiller, who in 1992 invited her to join the cast of his short-lived but acclaimed Fox television sketch comedy program The Ben Stiller Show. A stint on Garry Shandling's breakthrough HBO series The Larry Sanders Show (for which she was nominated for an Emmy award in 1996) soon followed, and in 1994 Garofalo reunited with Stiller in the film comedy Reality Bites, a role which earned her the much-despised tag of "Generation X comedian." That fall, she joined the cast of Saturday Night Live but exited before the conclusion of the season, publicly disheartened by the show's increasing drop-off in quality.After signing on as a correspondent on Michael Moore's news magazine TV Nation and hosting Comedy Product, a standup showcase on the Comedy Central cable network, Garofalo began work on her breakthrough role, co-starring with Uma Thurman in the 1996 romantic comedy hit The Truth About Cats and Dogs. That same year, she also co-starred with Bill Murray in Larger Than Life, and appeared briefly in The Cable Guy and Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy. Garofalo's prolific output continued in 1997; in addition to starring roles in two comedies, Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion and The Matchmaker, she was featured prominently in James Mangold's Cop Land and Paul Schrader's Touch, she hosted the MTV series Indie Outing, and she remained a fixture of the emerging alternative comedy circuit. In 1998, Garofalo's career continued to thrive, with starring and supporting roles in a number of films. Some of her more notable work included Clay Pigeons, a black comedy with Vince Vaughn and Joaquin Phoenix; Permanent Midnight, which marked another collaboration with Stiller; and the animated Kiki's Delivery Service, which featured Garofalo as the voice of a new age artist and mystic. She also acted against type as one half of a revoltingly cheerful couple in Bruce McCulloch's comedy Dog Park. The following year, Garofalo appeared in no less than five films, with a supporting part in the ensemble piece 200 Cigarettes, a starring role as an unconventional action heroine called the Bowler in Mystery Men (which also featured Stiller), and prominent turns in Kevin Smith's eagerly awaited Dogma, Hampton Fancher's psychological thriller The Minus Man, and the satirical comedy Can't Stop Dancing, in which she acted alongside fellow comedienne Margaret Cho.In 2001, Garofolo took on the role of Catherine Connolly in The Laramie Project, HBO's docudrama chronicling the aftermath of the death of Matthew Shepard, and filmmaker David Wain's comedy Wet Hot American Summer. The actress joined the cast of Pixar's Ratatouille in 2007 to voice the role of Colette, a talented French chef, and appeared on television shows including Two and a Half Men, 24, and Criminal Minds.

Trivia: Supporting actress, onscreen from the '70s.

Trivia: Educated at Roosevelt University, bearded, booming-voiced Louis Zorich has been a working actor for nearly 50 years. Zorich made his off-Broadway debut in a revival of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, and has appeared on Broadway in Becket, Moby Dick, Hadrian VII, and Moonchildren. He also appeared as Ben in Dustin Hoffman's 1984 staging of Death of a Salesman, repeating this role in the 1985 film version. On television, Zorich has been seen as Jules Berger in Brooklyn Bridge (1991) and as Paul Reiser's father in Mad About You (which ran from 1992 to 1999), and heard in innumerable commercial voice-overs. Louis Zorich is the husband of Oscar-winning actress Olympia Dukakis.

Trivia: Started her professional acting career in 1974.At the start of her career, learned to type to work in offices while also auditioning in New York.In 2008, was awarded the School of Theatre Distinguished Alumni Award by the Boston University College of Fine Arts.Has played a teacher in multiple projects, including Lean on Me (1989), If Looks Could Kill (1991), Curb Your Enthusiasm and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.In 2016, was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female for her work in the film H. (2014).

Trivia: American actor Tim Conway was born in Willoughby, Ohio, but grew up in the curiously named community Chagrin Falls, a fact that he'd later incorporate for a quick laugh in many of his comedy routines, TV films and movies. After majoring in speech and radio at Bowling Green State University, Conway went into the Eighth Army Assignment Team, where, much in the manner of his later bumbling screen characters, he managed to "misplace" a boatload of 7500 replacement troops. Once the army was through with him (and vice versa), Conway secured a job answering mail for a Cleveland radio deejay; his letters were so amusing that he was given a position as a writer in the promotional department, then went on to direct a TV program called Ernie's Place. Whenever Ernie was short a guest, Conway showed up as "Dag Hereford," a so-called authority on several subjects who'd reveal himself to be a blithering simpleton. Comedienne Rose Marie happened to be in Cleveland in 1961, and upon catching Conway's routine recommended the young erstwhile comic to Steve Allen; Conway redid the Hereford bit for Allen's ABC variety series in the fall of '61, fracturing the audiences (and Allen) in three memorable appearances. Now that he was a full-fledged comic, he knew he couldn't continue performing under his real name, Tom Conway, since that was also the name of a well-known British actor; Allen advised Tom to "dot the O," and thereafter he was known as Tim Conway. In 1962, Conway was engaged to play the Doug Hereford-like role of Ensign Doug Parker on the wartime sitcom McHale's Navy, which lasted six seasons and made Conway a star. The actor made several attempts over the following decades to succeed as a solo TV star (witness his 1967 western comedy Rango on ABC), but none of his post-McHale's Navy series have been anything resembling hits. Still, Conway was always welcome as a supporting comic, and he scored major success with hysterically funny appearances opposite Harvey Korman on The Carol Burnett Show in the 1970s; Conway also enjoyed a measure of success as star or co-star of a number of Disney films and low-budget "regional" comedy pictures like The Prize Fighter (1978) and The Private Eyes (1980). In the late 1980s and '90s Conway starred in a popular series of satirical "how-to" home videos, playing a diminutive, dim-bulbed Scandinavian named Dorf; he also lent an acclaimed comedic cameo as a driving instructor to the action film Speed 2 (1997), and voiced a series of Christian-themed animated videos entitled Hermie & Friends, with such friends and colleagues as the late Don Knotts and Burnett co-star Vicki Lawrence. Conway would continue to appear on screen over the coming years, making memorable appearances on TV shows like 30 Rock and providing the voice of Barnacle Bob on the animated series Spongebob Squarepants.

Trivia: Rubber-faced comic actor and vocal artist extraordinaire Hank Azaria initially plied his trade on the stand-up circuit, then subsequently landed stage appearances and tackled bit parts on television. Azaria scored his breakthrough in 1989 when he began providing a multitude of voices for the Fox network's groundbreaking animated series The Simpsons, an assignment that imparted the performer with an enviable degree of cult stardom. In 1991, Azaria nabbed a major role in the Fox live-action sitcom Herman's Head, which ran until 1994 and gave audiences a glimpse of the man responsible for the vocal intonations of some of the most famous characters to ever corrupt an animator's storyboard.A native of Queens, NY, where he was born into a family of Sephardic Jews on April 25, 1964, Azaria commenced film roles in the late 1980s, coincident with his Simpsons stardom. Work on that program (which, after graduating from a series of crude sketches on The Tracey Ullmann Show to its own animated sitcom, quickly shot up to qualify as the Fox network's most popular enterprise) easily outstripped Azaria's screen work in popularity and visibility for many years. Recurring parts included Indian convenience store owner Apu, quack doctor Nick Riviera, dim-witted bartender Moe, and the idiotic, pig-nosed Springfield Chief of Police, Clancy Wiggum. Though his Simpsons work continued unabated over the years, beginning in the mid-1990s Azaria branched out somewhat, placing a heavier emphasis on live-action portrayals. Even in that venue, however, his work tonally mirrored his animated contributions; he specialized in adroitly handling goofy, over-the-top character parts, often with an ethnic bent. The performer attained visibility and memorability, for example, as the klutzy and scantily-dressed gay houseboy Agador in The Birdcage (1995), Hector, a goofy Hispanic paramour with a permanent effeminate lisp, in Joe Roth's underrated showbiz comedy America's Sweethearts (2001), and Claude, a Gallic beach bum with no qualms about taking off with other men's wives, in John Hamburg's gross-out romantic comedy Along Came Polly (2004).Azaria has also departed from the boundaries of screen comedy from time to time, doing memorable work across genre lines in such films as Great Expectations (1998) (which cast him as Gwyneth Paltrow's lackluster fiancé), Mystery Men (1999) (as the superhero Blue Raja), and Tim Robbins' Cradle Will Rock (1999), a historical drama about art and politics in 1930s New York that cast Azaria as leftist playwright Marc Blitzstein. In 2005, Azaria presided as one of the many off-color monologuists in Penn Jillette's stand-up comedy showcase film The Aristocrats; the performer subsequently provided at least seventeen voices (including his usual series roles) for The Simpsons Movie (2007) and voiced both Abbie Hoffmann and Allen Ginsberg in the animated sequences of Brett Morgen's offbeat documentary Chicago 10 (2007).He appeared in the pre-historic comedy Year One, and provided several voices in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. He played an ethically challenged doctor in Love and Other Drugs, and portrayed Gargamel, the bad guy in the big-screen hit The Smurfs. He was in family film Hop, and lent his prodigious vocal talents to Happy Feet Two. In 2012 he acted in the biopic Lovelace.In July 1999, Azaria married actress Helen Hunt, with whom he co-starred in several episodes of the sitcom Mad About You. The two divorced within eighteen months.

Trivia: With his giraffe-like countenance and unusually tall haircut, American musician/actor Lyle Lovett may look like the archetypal rube, but don't be fooled: he is well educated (he earned journalism and foreign language degrees from Texas A&M), extremely articulate, and highly disciplined. Achieving his first big success in the mid-1980s, Lovett successfully straddled two musical forms on the verge of renewed popularity, folk-rock and country. Lovett also proved himself an adept actor with important roles in three Robert Altman films, The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), and Ready to Wear (1994), a reputation he has sustained in a handful of TV guest star shots. Lovett found himself the reluctant recipient of gaudy publicity hype in 1993 when he married movie superstar Julia Roberts, a union that disintegrated (thanks in no small part to incessant and intrusive press coverage) less than two years later. He would go on to make occasional acting appearances in movies like Three Days of Rain and on TV shows like Castle.

Trivia: Awarded a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1984, the inimitable Cyndi Lauper has also accumulated a sufficient amount of screen and TV credits. Other than brief cameos in WWF videos during her bizarre wrestling-crossover phase, Lauper's first feature-film venture was in 1985, singing the theme song for The Goonies. She would appear on several other soundtracks throughout the decade (including singing the theme song for Pee-Wee's Playhouse), but her acting debut was in the star vehicle Vibes (1988), which didn't do too well at the box office. Her next leading role was in another flop, Off and Running (1990), where she met her husband, actor David Thornton. She had a small role in the family comedy Life With Mikey in 1993, as well as contributing to the musical score. While she continued to put out albums, she made a few guest appearances on TV shows. In 1995, she won an Emmy award for her role as Marianne on the sitcom Mad About You. It wasn't until her role as Sally in the independent film The Opportunists in 2000 that she got some critical acclaim for her acting performance in a film. She would follow this with a handful of selective appearances on screen over the coming years, playing cameo roles on shows like That's So Raven, and in films like National Lampoon's Dirty Movie.

Trivia: Trained at London's Webber-Douglas academy, Paxton Whitehead made his professional debut in 1956, and within two years was signed by the RSC. Crossing the Atlantic to appear in Canadian stage and TV productions, Whitehead made his Broadway bow in 1962's The Affair. He went on to appear with the American Shakespeare Company, to direct in regional repertory, and to function as artistic director of the Shaw Festival, a job he held down for ten years. His later Broadway credits include Crucifer of Blood (as Sherlock Holmes) and the 1980 revival of Camelot (as Pellinore). Whitehead's first film appearance was in the 1986 Whoopi Goldberg comedy Jumpin' Jack Flash. The following year, he starred as Dudley the Butler in the syndicated sitcom Marblehead Manor; one of his co-stars was Linda Thorson, with whom he'd appeared on Broadway in Noises Off. In 1995, Paxton Whitehead was starred as cable-TV exec Duke Stone in the WB Network situation comedy Simon, one of that fledgling network's few bonafide successes.