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: Thrushlike American actress Kay Lenz was most effectively cast as hippielike free spirits, even though she rose to prominence after the "flower child" craze had come and gone. After a lot of TV work, Lenz was given her big movie break in director Clint Eastwood's Breezy (1973) as the teenybopper girl friend of middle-aged businessman William Holden. Kay followed this triumph with an Emmy-winning performance in the 1974 ABC Afternoon Playbreak special "Hearts in Hiding." After another good movie assignment in the above-average Canadian actioner White Line Fever, Kay was cast as one of the title characters in The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday (1976), portraying a gold-hearted (and light-headed) whore in the old west. Though heavily promoted, the film was a failure, and Lenz had to step down from the ranks of Movie Star to become an actress again -- which she did, in the TV miniseries Rich Man Poor Man. Amidst indifferent movie roles, solid TV work and occasional cartoon voiceover assignments, Kay returned to the forefront of public consciousness in 1988, winning her second Emmy for her guest role as an embittered AIDS victim on the TV series Midnight Caller. This scorching performance assured that Kay Lenz would never, ever be written off as merely the wife of one-time teen idol David Cassidy.

Trivia: Actress/singer Darlene Carr was 14 when she was discovered for films by Walt Disney. Darlene's Disney credits include a juvenile role in Monkeys Go Home (1965), in which she sang a duet with Maurice Chevalier; Gallegher Goes West, a 1966 TV miniseries; and the animated The Jungle Book, as the voice of the Indian girl in the final scene. Free of her Disney obligations in 1967, Darlene quickly shed her goody-two-shoes image with the role of a bikinied high schooler in The Impossible Years (1968). A frequent visitor to television, Darlene was seen in the recurring role of Karl Malden's daughter on The Streets of San Francisco (1972-77), and was a regular on The John Forsythe Show (1965), The Smith Family (1971) and The Oregon Trail (1977). She also starred as the TV sitcom world's first unwed mother in 1979's Miss Winslow and Son. Darleen Carr is the sister of Charmian Carr, who played Liesl in The Sound of Music (1965).

Trivia: The famous offspring of actors Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard Nelson, Rick Nelson (born Eric Hilliard Nelson) began performing on his parents' radio show when he was only four. When Ozzie and Harriet moved to television in 1952, Rick went with them and while on the show, grew up to become a teen idol, loved not only as an actor but also as a rock & roll singer who racked up hits with such singles as "Hello Mary Lou," "Travelin' Man," and "Garden Party" (his biggest and last big hit). Nelson made his feature-film debut in A Story of Three Loves. He earned critical acclaim as a cocky young gunfighter in Rio Bravo (1959) starring opposite John Wayne and Dean Martin. He continued appearing in films, in concert, and on television through the early '80s. Nelson, the father of actress Tracy Nelson and twin pop stars Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, died in a plane crash along with his fiancée and his band on New Year's Eve 1985.

Trivia: Cheryl Miller -- also sometimes billed as Cheryl Lynn Miller -- was a popular ingenue of the mid-1960's, in movies and on television. She was born in Sherman Oaks, California in 1943 (some sources say 1944), and made her screen debut as an infint in the movie Casanova Brown (1944). She studied at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, taking occasional acting roles, on series such as Leave It To Beaver and Perry Mason, and photo modeling spots. The year 1965 marked her breakthrough -- first, though she didn't realize its importance at the time, a guest spot on Flipper brought her to the attention of producer Ivan Tors, who cast her in the feature film Clarence, The Cross-Eyed Lion (1965), which became the pilot for a proposed series called Daktari. And she was discovered by Walt Disney, who signed her to a contract and put her into a prominent supporting role in The Monkey's Uncle (1965). And in November of that year, she was named one of dozen actresses designated as Hollywood Deb Stars of 1966, a group that also included Melody Patterson, Edy Williams, Peggy Lipton, and Sally Field, and led to her appearance on a television special early the following year. Daktari was sold as a series and in January of 1966 Miller and the rest of the cast, headed by Marshall Thompson, headed for Africa to begin filming. For the next four years, Miller was seen as Paula Tracy, the daughter of veterinarian Marsh Tracy, on the series. Following the cancellation of the series in early 1969, she was cast in the short-lived daytime drama Bright Promise. By that time, her wholesome good looks were no longer in fashion. Her public support for Richard Nixon in the 1968 presidential race -- alongside such marginal pop-culture figures as Burt Ward (Robin on Batman) -- reflected how out-of-touch she was, in terms of image. Miller continued to work regularly, mostly in television, and also ventured into a singing career for a time -- and got onto The Tonight Show -- and by the 1970s her days of co-starring roles were behind her. Miller's last recorded small-screen appearance was in an episode of The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo.