Trivia: Born in Des Moines, Iowa, Sada Thompson grew up in New Jersey, where her magazine-editor father had been transferred. Active in high school plays, she was all of 16 when she first appeared at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, playing Nick's Ma in a campus production of The Time of Your Life. Graduating from Carnegie with a BFA in 1949, Thompson launched her professional career, playing mature and sometimes elderly women at a time when she herself was barely old enough to vote. While working at New York's 92nd Street YMHA, a Jewish cultural center, she participated in the first-ever reading of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, which led to her off-Broadway debut in the 1955 staging of that same piece. She spent the next decade in regional theatre, returning to New York for her first real breakthrough performance in the Lincoln Center's production of Tartuffe. A few years later, Thompson won an Obie Award for her work in Paul Zindel's The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, and in 1971 she copped the Tony award for her interpretation of four different women in the Broadway production Twigs. On the strength of this success, she was signed to play the Bunker Family's free-spirited neighbor Irene Lorenzo on All in the Family. After a single taping session, it was obvious that Thompson and producer Norman Lear would never see eye to eye, and she was replaced by Betty Garrett (one unnamed source close to both sides of the argument later claimed that "Sada had too much genuine class and didn't yell loud enough for a Norman Lear show"). While she continued appearing in television specials like Our Town and The Entertainer and miniseries like Sandburg's Lincoln, Thompson would not consider a weekly program until she was personally asked by executive producer Mike Nichols to play matriarch Kate Lawrence on his seriocomic series Family. She remained with Family from its debut in 1976 until its cancellation in 1980, winning a 1978 Emmy Award in the process. Thompson spent her later years occasionally co-starring in such made-for-TV films as 1985's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the controversial Indictment: The McMartin Trial (for HBO). Her last major assignment was a turn as Jackson Pollock's mother in Ed Harris's Pollock (2000). Thompson died 11 years later, of lung disease. She was 83.

Trivia: Authoritative American character actor James Broderick is best known to filmgoers of the flower-power generation for his performance as Alice's husband in the 1969 film Alice's Restaurant. It was but one of many incisive film characterizations for Broderick, who was equally effective in such films as The Group (1966), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975). From 1976 through 1980, Broderick played lawyer/patriarch Doug Lawrence in the weekly TV drama Family; he had previously starred in the detective series Brenner, playing the rookie-cop son of Edward Binns (who wasn't that much older). James Broderick was the father of contemporary film star Matthew Broderick, who paid homage to his dad by prominently displaying the elder Broderick's photograph in the 1990 film The Freshman.

Trivia: Lead and former juvenile actress McNichol is the daughter of a former actress. At age six she began appearing in commercials and was in TV shows by age nine. At 12 she became a regular on the TV series Apple's Way; after that show was canceled she was soon signed to the cast of Family, for which she went on to win two Emmy Awards. She began appearing onscreen in the late '70s, and looked to be on her way to a good film career with her costarring role in Little Darlings (1980), a popular teen-oriented comedy; however, most of her subsequent films were either low-quality or unsuccessful, and she never established herself as a screen actress. In the late '80s and early '90s she costarred on the TV sitcom Empty Nest.

Trivia: Born in Missouri and educated at the University of Oklahoma, Alice Ghostley created a sensation in her first Broadway production, New Faces of 1952. In the company of such powerhouse co-stars as Paul Lynde, Robert Clary and Carol Lawrence, Ghostley stole the show with her plaintive renditions of the satirical ballads "The Boston Beguine" and "Time for Tea." Within a year of New Faces, she was headlined in the film version of that popular revue and was cast as a regular on the network-TV series Freedom Ring. Ghostley has been convulsing audiences ever since, playing a rich variety of man-chasing bachelorettes, overprotective mothers and dotty neighbors. While most of her film appearances have been in comedies (Viva Max!, The Graduate, Grease), Ghostley proved quite effective in the comparatively straight role of Stephanie Crawford in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). In 1965, she won a Tony award for her performance in the Broadway seriocomedy The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. In addition, Ghostley has been a regular or semi-regular on a multitude of TV series: The Jackie Gleason Show, Car 54 Where Are You, Captain Nice, The Jonathan Winters Show, The Golddiggers, Designing Women and a host of others. She is most fondly remembered for her portrayal of bumbling witch Esmerelda on the long-running (1964-72) sitcom Bewitched. On both this series and 1972's Temperatures Rising, Alice Ghostley was reunited with her old New Faces cohort, Paul Lynde. Ghostley died of colon cancer at age 81 in September 2007.

Trivia: Following community theater experiences, Joseph Bottoms began accumulating TV-movie credits. His first theatrical-feature role was Robin Lee Graham, the seafaring protagonist of The Dove (1974). He went on to play Jewish resistance fighter Rudi Weiss in the 1978 TV miniseries Holocaust and Kirk Cranston on the NBC daytime drama Santa Barbara. The "middle" brother in the Bottoms family, actor Joseph Bottoms was born three years after Timothy Bottoms and one year before Sam Bottoms. In the company of his brother Timothy, Joseph Bottoms made his Broadway debut in 1981's The 5th of July; and with both Timothy and Sam Bottoms, Joseph co-starred in the abortive TV pilot Island Sons (1987).