Trivia: Born March 15th, 1935, Bronx-native Judd Hirsch attended CCNY, where he majored in engineering and physics. A blossoming fascination in the theatre convinced Hirsch that his future lay in acting. He studied at the AADA and worked with a Colorado stock company before his 1966 Broadway debut in Barefoot in the Park. He spent many years at New York's Circle Repertory, where he appeared in the first-ever production of Lanford Wilson's The Hot L Baltimore. After an auspicious TV-movie bow in the well-received The Law (1974), Hirsch landed his first weekly-series assignment, playing the title character in the cop drama Delvecchio (1976-77). From 1978 to 1982, he was seen as Alex Reiger in the popular ensemble comedy Taxi, earning two Emmies in the process. While occupied with Taxi, Hirsch found time to act off-Broadway, winning an Obie award for the 1979 production Talley's Folly. In the following decade, he was honored with two Tony Awards for the Broadway efforts I'm Not Rappoport and Conversations with My Father. His post-Taxi TV series roles include Press Wyman in Detective in the House (1985) and his Golden Globe-winning turn as John Lacey in Dear John (1988-92). Judd Hirsch could also be seen playing Jeff Goldblum's father in the movie blockbuster Independence Day (1996). In 2001, Hirsch co-starred with Paul Bettany and Christopher Plummer in the multi-Award winning biopic A Beautiful Mind. The actor once again found success on the television screen in CBS' drama Numb3rs, in which he took on the role of Alan Eppes, father of FBI agent Don Eppes (Rob Morrow) and Professor Charlie Eppes (David Krumholtz). After appearing on all four seaons of Numb3rs, Hirsch took a small role in director Brett Ratner's crime comedy Tower Heist (2011).

Trivia: Andy Kaufman's performances were like no other. He not only pushed the boundaries of good taste and audience tolerance, he also created a myriad of strange, wonderful, and sometimes horrific characters, switching effortlessly from one to the other, effectively blurring the lines between Kaufman the man and Kaufman the artist. For many years, his fans argued whether or not obnoxious lounge singer Tony Clifton (whom Kaufman once hired to open for his live shows) was for real or whether he was an elaborate persona. Kaufman himself best summed up his art, stating, " I am not a comic, I have never told a joke....The comedian's promise is that he will go out there and make you laugh with him....My only promise is that I will try to entertain you as best I can. I can manipulate people's reactions. There are different kinds of laughter. Gut laughter is where you don't have a choice, you've got to laugh. Gut laughter doesn't come from the intellect. And it's much harder for me to evoke now, because I'm known. They say, 'Oh wow, Andy Kaufman, he's a really funny guy.' But I'm not trying to be funny. I just want to play with their heads."Born and raised in the upper-class Long Island suburb of Great Neck, NY, Kaufman had a lifelong fascination with performing. At age nine, Kaufman was performing at children's parties and in 1963, he unsuccessfully tried out for a spot at Budd Friedman's improvisational comedy club. He discovered the joy of "being" Elvis Presley in 1964 and later in his career became so good at imitating the moves and physical presence of "The King," that Presley himself deemed Kaufman his favorite impersonator. A year after his high school graduation, Kaufman enrolled in the Television and Radio program at Grahm Junior College in Boston. While there, he started performing at local coffee houses and appearing in the campus-sponsored The Soul Time Review. Kaufman went to Spain in 1971 to study Transcendental Meditation and travel. Later that year, he successfully auditioned for Budd Friedman and landed a standup gig at a Long Island club. More club dates followed and television appearances followed. In 1975, Kaufman appeared in the first broadcast of NBC's sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live. Through the decade up to the early '80s, Kaufman would periodically return to host the show. His comedy was typically extreme and sometimes unfathomable. In November 1982, the producers of SNL responded to a viewer telephone poll and asked Kaufman to never again host the show. In 1978, Kaufman took one of his most popular characters, the Foreign Man, an incomprehensible comic from Central Europe, and translated him into the delightful, sometimes poignant foreign auto mechanic Latka Gravas on the popular sitcom Taxi (1978-1983). Kaufman created his famed world Inter-Gender Wrestling matches in 1979. A longtime aficionado of professional wrestling but too small to beat men, he would wrestle with female audience members, offering a large cash prize if they could pin him. 400 tried, but none succeeded. In 1981, Kaufman hosted Fridays, an experimental comedy show in which his intentional line flubbing caused a fight between himself, the cast, and the crew. The following week, Kaufman aired a tearful taped apology that may or may not have been a put-on. More controversy followed when the performer got into an ugly row with professional wrestler Jerry "The King" Lawler that culminated in his throwing hot coffee on Lawler during a taping of the Late Night With David Letterman show in 1982. The fight was precipitated by an earlier wrestling match between Kaufman and Lawler in which the wrestler inflicted a serious head injury to the comic. This violent feud between the two is further detailed in the 1983 documentary chronicle of Kaufman's wrestling career, I'm From Hollywood. Kaufman made his feature-film debut as an actor in Demon (1977) and afterward, only appeared in three more films. Kaufman developed a cough in late 1983 that was diagnosed as a rare form of lung cancer. Though only in his mid-thirties, a teetotaler, lifelong nonsmoker, and a vegetarian, Kaufman was only given a few months to live. He tried a variety of alternative healing therapies, as well as chemotherapy, but nothing worked and Kaufman died in 1984. Ironically, some fans believe the illness was all an elaborate hoax and maintain that Kaufman is still alive, waiting to come back in a couple decades. Though it is extremely doubtful that even Kaufman would be able to pull off such a hoax, the thought that others would think him capable of doing it would have pleased him.

Trivia: Of Scandinavian stock, Barry Nelson was no sooner graduated from the University of California-Berkeley than he was signed to an MGM contract. Most of his MGM feature-film assignments were supporting roles, though he was given leads in the 1942 "B" A Yank in Burma and the 1947 "Crime Does Not Pay" short The Luckiest Guy in the World. While serving in the Army, Nelson made his Broadway debut in the morale-boosting Moss Hart play Winged Victory, repeating his role (and his billing of Corporal Barry Nelson) in the 1944 film version. Full stardom came Nelson's way in such Broadway productions of the 1950s and 1960s as The Rat Race, The Moon is Blue and Cactus Flower. He repeated his Broadway role in the 1963 film version of Mary Mary, and both directed and acted in Frank Gilroy's two-character play The Only Game in Town (1968). Nelson starred in a trio of 1950s TV series: the 1952 espionager The Hunter, the 1953 sitcom My Favorite Husband, and the unjustly neglected Canadian-filmed 1958 adventure series Hudson's Bay (1959). Oh, and did you know that Nelson was the first actor ever to play Ian Fleming's secret agent James Bond on television? Yep: Barry Nelson portrayed American spy Jimmy Bond on a 1954 TV adaptation of Fleming's Casino Royale. Nelson died of unspecified causes on April 7, 2007, while traveling through Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He was 84.