Trivia: Angela Lansbury received an Oscar nomination for her first film, Gaslight, in 1944, and has been winning acting awards and audience favor ever since. Born in London to a family that included both politicians and performers, Lansbury came to the U.S. during World War II. She made notable early film appearances as the snooty sister in National Velvet (1944); the pathetic singer in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), which garnered her another Academy nomination; and the madam-with-a-heart-of-gold saloon singer in The Harvey Girls (1946). She turned evil as the manipulative publisher in State of the Union (1948), but was just as convincing as the good queen in The Three Musketeers (1948) and the petulant daughter in The Court Jester (1956). She received another Oscar nomination for her chilling performance as Laurence Harvey's scheming mother in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and appeared as the addled witch in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), among other later films. On Broadway, she won Tony awards for the musicals Mame (1966), Dear World (1969), the revival of Gypsy (1975), Sweeney Todd (1979) and, at age 82, for the play Blithe Spirit (2009). Despite a season in the '50s on the game show Pantomime Quiz, she came to series television late, starring in 1984-1996 as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote; she took over as producer of the show in the '90s. She returned to the Disney studios to record the voice of Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast (1991) and to sing the title song and later reprised the role in the direct-to-video sequel, The Enchanted Christmas (1997). Lansbury is the sister of TV producer Bruce Lansbury.

Trivia: Lead actress Erin Gray first appeared onscreen in the late '70s.

Trivia: Born in Indiana and raised in Minnesota, John McMartin attended college in both Illinois and New York. McMartin initially wanted to be a print or radio journalist, but opted instead for acting. His first big break was as Corporal Billy Jester in the 1959 off-Broadway operetta spoof Little Mary Sunshine, which won him both a Theatre World award and a bride (he married Cynthia Baer, one of the show's producers). After appearing in two Bob Fosse-directed productions, he enjoyed a long run as Gwen Verdon's nervous boyfriend Oscar in Fosse's Sweet Charity (1965). He went westward to repeat the role of Oscar in the 1969 film version of Charity, but preferred New York to Hollywood and returned to the stage. In 1971, he was cast as Benjamin Stone in the Stephen Sondheim hit Follies (nine years earlier, he'd been cut from Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum). He then spent several years playing classical-and non-musical-stage roles. Throughout his Broadway years, he made infrequent film and TV appearances; he played supporting roles in such movies as All the President's Men (1976) and Pennies from Heaven (1980), was briefly a regular on Falcon Crest, guested as Shelley Fabares' father on the sitcom Coach, and was seen in the made-for-TV features Separate but Equal (1991) and Citizen Cohn (1992). One of his most intriguing TV assignments was the 1965 pilot film for the never-sold lawyer series Higher and Higher, in which his co-stars were a couple of green kids named Sally Kellerman and Dustin Hoffman. In the 1990s, John McMartin scored a huge success as Captain Andy in producer Hal Prince's gargantuan revival of Show Boat.

Trivia: University of Pennsylvania grad David Naughton studied for a performing career at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. Naughton first developed a following via his ubiquitous appearances in the musical Dr. Pepper commercials of the 1970s ("I'm a pepper, you're a pepper" etc.) In 1979, he starred as Billy Manucci on the "disco adventure" TV series Makin' It; Naughton's vocal rendition of the title song was briefly #5 on the pop charts. His subsequent series stints included 1983's At Ease and 1986's My Sister Sam. Naughton is most familiar to horror-flick devotees as reluctant lycanthrope David Kessler in the 1981 film An American Werewolf in London. David Naughton is the younger brother of stage and film actor James Naughton.

Trivia: A onetime schoolteacher, Jean Peters was brought to Hollywood in 1946 upon winning a popularity contest in her home state of Ohio. She was signed to a 20th Century Fox contract and given star billing in her first film, Captain From Castile. With rare exceptions, Peters seldom played conventional ingénues; most of her characters were peppery, combative, and doggedly independent. After 1955's A Man Called Peter, Peters completely retired from films, having recently married billionaire Howard Hughes in a secret ceremony. The union was as bizarre as anything else in Hughes' life; he and Peters lived separately and rarely saw each other, conducting most of their tête-à-tête by telephone or through intermediaries. Only when Peters divorced Hughes in 1971 did she reemerge in the public eye. Two years later, Jean Peters briefly jump-started her acting career with her performance in the PBS TV drama Winesburg, Ohio.

Trivia: While growing up in Chicago, Tom Bosley dreamed of becoming the star left-fielder for the Cubs. As it turned out, the closest Bosley got to organized athletics was a sportscasting class at DePauw University. After additional training at the Radio Institute of Chicago and two years' practical experience in various dramatic radio programs and stock companies, he left for New York in 1950. Five years of odd jobs and summer-theater stints later, he landed his first off-Broadway role, playing Dupont-Dufort in Jean Anouilh's Thieves' Carnival. Steadier work followed at the Arena Theatre in Washington, D.C.; then in 1959, Bosley landed the starring role in the Broadway musical Fiorello!, picking up a Tony Award, an ANTA Award, and the New York Drama Critics Award in the bargain. In 1963, he made his film bow as Natalie Wood's "safe and secure" suitor Anthony Colombo in Love With the Proper Stranger. Occasionally cast as two-bit criminals or pathetic losers (he sold his eyes to blind millionairess Joan Crawford in the Spielberg-directed Night Gallery TV movie), Bosley was most often seen as a harried suburban father. After recurring roles on such TV series as That Was the Week That Was, The Debbie Reynolds Show, and The Sandy Duncan Show, Bosley was hired by Hanna-Barbera to provide the voice of flustered patriarch Howard Boyle on the animated sitcom Wait Til Your Father Gets Home (1972-1973). This served as a dry run of sorts for his most famous series-TV assignment: Howard Cunningham, aka "Mr. C," on the immensely popular Happy Days (1974-1983). The warm, familial ambience of the Happy Days set enabled Bosley to weather the tragic death of his first wife, former dancer Jean Elliot, in 1978. In addition to his Happy Days duties, Bosley was narrator of the syndicated documentary That's Hollywood (1977-1981). From 1989 to 1991, he starred on the weekly series The Father Dowling Mysteries, and thereafter was seen on an occasional basis as down-to-earth Cabot Cove sheriff Amos Tupper on Murder, She Wrote. Reportedly as kind, generous, and giving as his Happy Days character, Tom Bosley has over the last 20 years received numerous honors for his many civic and charitable activities.

Trivia: American actress Lucie Arnaz was the first child of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Lucie was a genuine "miracle baby", delivered by C-section after her 40-year-old mother had suffered several miscarriages. In the public eye almost from birth, Lucie and her younger brother Desi Jr. frequently accompanied their parents to the set of I Love Lucy; both children, in fact, made their professional TV debuts as extras on the last Lucy half-hour filmed in 1957. Lucille Ball arranged for Lucie to play bits on her post-Desi TV series of the 1960s, The Lucy Show. When Lucie decided she enjoyed the limelight, her mother agreed to allow her to continue as a full supporting player on her next series, Here's Lucy (1968-74) -- but only on the condition that she kept apace in school and stayed out of trouble. The notion that Lucie would flounder without the support of her parents was quashed when she won a Theatre World Award for her 1978 Broadway debut in They're Playing Our Song. Lucie had earlier established herself as an actress of distinction in the 1976 TV movie Who Is the Black Dahlia?, and even managed to emerge from the painful Neil Diamond version of The Jazz Singer (1980) without any loss of reputation. She has also starred in two short-lived TV series, The Lucie Arnaz Show (1985) and Sons and Daughters (1991). Long married to actor Laurence Luckinbill, Lucie Arnaz has in recent years become the torchbearer of the Lucy/Desi legacy by marketing several reels of the Arnaz' 1940s home movies for TV and videocassette exposure.

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: Because the two actresses tended to play the same type of overwrought roles in the mid-1950s, juvenile stars Patty McCormick and Patty Duke were sometimes mistaken for one another during this period. But once seen in her starmaking role as the homicidal preteen Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed (in which she starred on Broadway in 1954 and in the film version in 1956), Patty McCormick can never be confused with anyone else. A pro from the age of four, McCormick was in films from 1951 and TV from 1953. After Bad Seed, she was second-billed as a bratty child star in the theatrical-film Kathy O' (1957) and was headlined in her own 1958 sitcom, Peck's Bad Girl. The uniqueness that characterized McCormick's appearances as a child evaporated when she reached maturity; though she was more than competent playing disturbed teenagers in films like The Miniskirt Mob (1967) and The Young Runaways (1968), these were parts that could have been played equally well by a dozen other young actresses. She acted sporadically into the 1970s and 1980s, her longest assignment being the role of Jeffrey Tambor's upwardly mobile wife on the TV sitcom The Ropers. In 1995, Patty McCormick starred in the direct-to-video Mommy, playing a grown-up edition of the murderous Rhoda from The Bad Seed.

Trivia: Character actor Barry Dennen works primarily on stage and British TV.