Trivia: Born Leonard Rosenberg, Randall moved to New York at age 19 and studied theater with Sanford Meisner and at the Neighborhood Playhouse. His stage debut was in The Circle of Chalk (1941). From 1942-46 he served with the U.S. Army, following which he acted on radio and TV. He began appearing onscreen in 1957 and was a fairly busy film actor through the mid '60s. He is best known for his work on TV, particularly for his portrayal of fastidious Felix Unger on the sitcom "The Odd Couple." He also starred or costarred in the series "One Man's Family," "Mr. Peepers," "The Tony Randall Show," and "Love, Sidney." He frequently appears on TV talk shows, where he is witty, erudite, and urbane. In 1991 he created the National Actors Theater, a repertory company; its purpose is to bring star-filled classic plays to broad-based audiences at low prices.

Trivia: Commenting on his notorious on-set irascibility in 1977, Jack Klugman replied that he was merely "taking Peter Falk lessons from Robert Blake," invoking the names of two other allegedly hard-to-please TV stars. Klugman grew up in Philadelphia, and after taking in a 1939 performance by New York's Group Theatre, Klugman decided that an actor's life was right up his alley. He majored in drama at Carnegie Tech and studied acting at the American Theatre Wing before making his (non-salaried) 1949 stage-debut at the Equity Library Theater. While sharing a New York flat with fellow hopeful Charles Bronson, Klugman took several "grub" jobs to survive, at one point selling his blood for $85 a pint. During television's so-called Golden Age, Klugman appeared in as many as 400 TV shows. He made his film debut in 1956, and three years later co-starred with Ethel Merman in the original Broadway production of Gypsy. In 1964, Klugman won the first of his Emmy awards for his performance in "Blacklist," an episode of the TV series The Defenders; that same year, he starred in his first sitcom, the 13-week wonder Harris Against the World. Far more successful was his next TV series, The Odd Couple, which ran from 1970 through 1974; Klugman won two Emmies for his portrayal of incorrigible slob Oscar Madison (he'd previously essayed the role when he replaced Walter Matthau in the original Broadway production of the Neil Simon play). It was during Odd Couple's run that the network "suits" got their first real taste of Klugman's savage indignation, when he and co-star Tony Randall threatened to boycott the show unless the idiotic laughtrack was removed (Klugman and Randall won that round; from 1971 onward, Odd Couple was filmed before a live audience). It was but a foretaste of things to come during Klugman's six-year (1977-83) reign as star of Quincy, M.E.. Popular though Klugman was in the role of the crusading, speechifying LA County Coroner's Office medical examiner R. Quincy, he hardly endeared himself to the producers when he vented his anger against their creative decisions in the pages of TV Guide. Nor was he warmly regarded by the Writer's Guild when he complained about the paucity of high-quality scripts (he wrote several Quincy episodes himself, with mixed results). After Quincy's cancellation, Klugman starred in the Broadway play I'm Not Rappaport and co-starred with John Stamos in the 1986 sitcom You Again?. The future of Klugman's career -- and his future, period -- was sorely threatened when he underwent throat surgery in 1989. He'd been diagnosed with cancer of the larynx as early as 1974, but at that time was able to continue working after a small growth was removed. For several years after the 1989 operation, Klugman was unable to speak, though he soon regained this ability. He continued working through 2011, and died the following year at age 90.

Trivia: Diminutive actor Jerry Maren achieved his first coup as a performer (and an incredible one at that) in 1939, when cast as one of the Munchkins in Victor Fleming's seminal The Wizard of Oz. He subsequently built up a remarkably extensive resumé, from the early '40s through the late '90s, with portrayals of midgets, gremlins, mole men, and any other character parts that called for thespians of small stature. Seinfeld aficionados may recall Maren as the aging circus performer father of Kramer's buddy Mickey in "The Yada Yada," a 1997 episode of that sitcom. Maren made headlines in 2007, when -- after a period of onscreen inactivity -- he was selected for his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Trivia: Diminutive, raspy-voiced German actor Fritz Feld first gained prominence as an assistant to Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt. Feld came to the U.S. in 1923 in the touring company of Reinhardt's The Miracle. Once he reached California, Feld formed the Hollywood Playhouse in partnership with Joseph Schildkraut; here he staged hundreds of productions featuring up-and-coming L.A. talent, including his future wife, actress Virginia Christine. In films on a sporadic basis since the 1920s, Feld began working onscreen regularly around 1936, eventually toting up over 400 movie appearances (not to mention his more than 700 TV stints and 1000-plus radio programs). He was cast as Viennese psychiatrists, Italian duellists, Teutonic movie directors, Russian orchestra leaders, and French maitre d's. It was in 1947's If You Knew Susie that Feld developed his signature "schtick": the sharp "Pop!" sound effect created by smacking his open mouth with the flattened palm of his hand. In the 1960s and 1970s, Feld was a favorite of moviemakers who'd grown up watching his vintage screen appearances; he was virtually a regular at the Disney studios, appeared in many of Jerry Lewis' projects, was given fourth billing in Gene Wilder's The World's Greatest Lover (1977), and was seen in Mel Brooks' Silent Movie (1976) (where his trademarked "Pop!" was conveyed via subtitle) and The History of the World, Part One (1981) (as the head waiter at the Last Supper). Among Fritz Feld's least characteristic screen appearances were his performance as a hearty Northwoods trapper in the 1976 "four-waller" Challenge to Be Free and his poignant cameo as the alcoholic who offers down-and-out Faye Dunaway a match in Barfly (1987).

Trivia: Comic actor Robert Ball was a fixture in television and, to a lesser degree, movies, from the late 1950s until the early 1990s. Mostly seen in group settings and character roles -- and billed variously as Robert Ball, Robert E. Ball, Bob Ball, and Bobby Ball -- his somewhat diminutive size only served to accentuate the impact of his wry, sardonic delivery, an attribute that various producers (including Leonard Stern and, later, Carl Reiner and Garry Marshall) used to piercing effect in episodes of their television series. Ball made his small-screen debut during 1957 on the series The Adventures of McGraw, and a year later he was part of the cast of Bruno VeSota's The Brain Eaters (1958), a low-budget science fiction film. These were both straight acting jobs, and any humor in The Brain Eaters, in particular, was wholly unintended. But when VeSota -- a busy character actor who occasionally worked as a filmmaker -- next occupied the director's chair four years later for Invasion of the Star Creatures (1962), Ball (billed as Bob Ball) had the lead role of Private Philbrick and was running on all comic cylinders. Alas, the movie wasn't up to what Ball and costar Frankie Ray brought to their roles, and it was singularly unappreciated by most critics. It has since become a kind of cult touchstone among aficionados of low-budget science fiction, horror, and so-called "psychotronic" cinema. In between The Brain Eaters and Invasion of the Star Creatures, Ball busied himself with small roles on every kind of television series, including Peter Gunn, Perry Mason, Route 66, Frontier Circus, Dr. Kildare, The Twilight Zone, I'm Dickens...He's Fenster, Mr. Novak, Ben Casey, The Jack Benny Program, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. He was particularly effective on the latter, in the episode "Bupkis", as Rob Petrie's larcenous former Army buddy who had signed his name to a song he had almost nothing to do with. Ball was something of a chameleon-like presence and could melt into a part, and even those familiar with his work could miss him in some of those roles. But stars and producers obviously liked his work. Dick Van Dyke Show creator/producer Carl Reiner used him in The Comic (1969) and in the subsequent New Dick Van Dyke Show, and longtime Reiner cohort Howard Morris used him in Who's Minding the Mint (1967). Ball had a relatively easy time slipping into the counter-culture era, getting roles in such representative films of the period as Easy Rider (as one of the mimes), Bunny O'Hare, and Zachariah. Continuing in television, he worked steadily across genres, including Westerns such as Bonanza and '70s topical sitcoms like Maude. Producer Garry Marshall -- himself a Dick Van Dyke Show alumnus -- gave him memorable comedic roles in The Odd Couple, Laverne and Shirley, and Happy Days; and Ball was one of the Marshall stock company picked up for the feature films Young Doctors in Love (1982) and Beaches (1988). This was, of course, sandwiched in between work on Starsky and Hutch, Kojak, and a dozen other TV series. Ball retired after 1992.

Trivia: Robust American character actor Donald Diamond was generally typecast as a Spaniard or a Native American. He worked frequently on television and in films from the '50s through the early '70s.

Trivia: Joshua Shelley was one of the more enduring victims of Hollywood's blacklist, a fate that overtook him almost as soon as he'd made his big-screen debut. A New York native who began performing at the age of four (when he recited Lincoln's Gettysburg Address at a Brooklyn department store), he became a vaudeville bandleader while attending New York University (also working, in time, as a student journalist), and played in some touring shows before the war. Shelley was drafted in 1942 and served in a special services unit attached to the Tenth Mountain Division. After World War II, he was cast in the musical-fantasy One Touch of Venus, playing three roles in the stage production. In 1948, he was in the cast of Make Mine Manhattan, a hit stage revue written by Shelley's former NYU classmate Arnold B. Horwitt, with Oskar Homolka, Jessie Royce Landis, and Nancy Walker. Shelley's biggest role on stage during this period, however, was as Ozzie in On The Town (the part that Jules Munshin played in the movie). During the late '40s, Shelley also made hundreds of appearances on radio in dramatic roles, on programs such as Dick Tracy, Counterspy, and This Is Your F.B.I., and on early television, primarily in dramatic vehicles, including the ABC anthology series Actors' Studio. He also later served as a disc jockey on WINS. Shelley came to Hollywood in 1949, making his debut in the Universal Pictures college musical Yes Sir, That's my Baby (a sort of poor man's Good News). It was his second movie, however, in the role of Crazy Parrin in Maxwell Shane's City Across the River, that should have put Shelley on the map. He played a character who was both pathetic and terrifying: Crazy is a mildly retarded member of the street gang the Dukes, one minute vulnerable and exploited by the men and women around him, the next a knife-wielding would-be killer tormenting anyone, male or female, that he thinks has crossed him or the gang. Shelley gave the performance of a lifetime -- dominating every scene he is in from the opening shot -- but he was to reap precious little reward for it. He was named as a Communist after the movie's release, and that was to be his last film for more than 15 years. Shelley, who had played hundreds of radio and television parts, found the broadcast media closed to him as well, and he returned to theatrical work during the 1950s. Some of those theater projects were, themselves, fairly controversial and challenging, including the musical I Want You, staged by satirist Theodore J. Flicker (later the director of the films The Troublemaker and The President's Analyst). Later there were again television series like Barney Miller and Phoenix 55, a satire of the '50s middle class starring Shelley, Harvey Lembeck, and Nancy Walker. In the summer of 1955, Shelley was one of a group of witnesses (also including Lee Hays of the Weavers) called to testify before hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, investigating supposed Communist infiltration of the entertainment industry. He never gave up on his career, despite the harassment that cut short his film and television work, and by the early '60s Shelley had re-emerged as a director, first on stage and then, as the influence of the Red Scare vanished, on television and in movies; he directed the extremely funny pilot to an unsold series called The Freudian Slip, written and created by Woody Allen, and co-directed the feature film release of The Perils of Pauline, starring Pat Boone and Pamela Austin. As an actor, he appeared in All The President's Men, Funny Lady, Billy Wilder's version of The Front Page, such TV movies as Kojak: The Marcus Nelson Murders, the mini-series Loose Change, and on series such as All In The Family and Kojak. He was also active as a director, on episodes of The Odd Couple, among other sitcoms. Shelley also gave a major supporting performance in Martin Ritt's comedy-drama about the blacklist era, The Front, starring Woody Allen and a cast of ex-blacklistees. In addition, he became a well-known teacher during the 1970s, and ironically, given the years of blacklisting, was given responsibility for training new acting talent at Columbia Pictures during the late '70s, in an attempt to revive the old Hollywood notion of contract players at the studio. Steven Spielberg and Martin Ritt were among the filmmakers who appeared as guest instructors under the program. Shelley died in his sleep, of a heart attack, early in 1990.

Trivia: Versatile American entertainer Johnny Silver has played character roles on stage, screen, television, and radio. He also performed in nightclubs, vaudeville, and even grand opera. His daughter, Stephanie Silver, became an actress. His other daughter, Jennifer, became a singer/songwriter.