Trivia: Gerald McRaney was 14 when he was possessed with the notion to become an actor. Five years later, McRaney landed a job with a New Orleans rep company, laboring away as an oil-field worker during the off-season. In 1969, he made his film bow in the Southern-fried cheapie The Night of Bloody Horror. Moving to LA in 1971, he took acting lessons with Jeff Corey, struggling to lose his Mississippi accent, and drove a cab between TV jobs. For nearly a decade, McRaney paid the rent by playing murderers, psychos and rapists. The actor was finally "humanized" as down-home, college-educated private eye Rick Simon on the breezy detective series Simon and Simon, which ran from 1981 to 1988. After this, he was briefly considered for the starring role in Coach; instead, he was cast as Marine major J. D. "Mac" McGillis in the long-running (1989-93) family sitcom Major Dad. He made his directorial debut with the 1991 TV movie Love and Curses...And All That Jazz, in which he also starred. In 1995, he was brought in to hypo the flagging CBS drama series Central Park West; when this series tanked, he resurfaced as the star of the "family values" weekly drama Promised Land (1996), a spin-off of his guest appearance on TV's Touched by an Angel. McRaney's second wife was Designing Woman co-star Delta Burke.

Trivia: American actress Wendy Phillips has appeared in a few feature films of the '70s and '80s, but she primarily works on television. She made her film debut in the TV movies One of Our Own and Death Be Not Proud. From 1976 to 1977, she appeared regularly on the television series Executive Suite where she played the daughter. In 1977, Phillips appeared in her first feature film, Fraternity Row. In film, she earned acclaim for playing the wife of Robert De Niro in Midnight Run (1988) and for playing the wife of notorious gangster Bugsy Siegel in Bugsy (1991). As of 1996, Phillips was co-starring on the television series Promised Land.

Trivia: American actress Celeste Holm made her first stage appearance in 1936 with a Pennsylvania stock company. Sophisticated and poised beyond her years, Holm was cast shortly afterward in a touring company of the ultra-chic Clare Boothe Luce comedy The Women, then played New York in such high-profile productions as The Time of Your Life. Rodgers and Hammerstein cast her as soubrette Ado Annie in Oklahoma! in 1943; both the production itself and Annie's show-stopping song "I Cain't Say No" affirmed Holm's future stardom. Following her film debut in Three Little Girls in Blue (1946), she was cast by her studio, 20th Century-Fox, in the role of the love-starved fashion editor in the prestige feature Gentlemen's Agreement (1947), for which she won an Academy Award. The important role of Bette Davis' understanding friend in another Oscar-winner, All About Eve (1950), has immortalized Holm amongst the film cultists. Stage, nightclub and television assignments followed (she starred in the short-lived 1950s sitcom Honestly, Celeste), and from the late 1950s onward, Holm was more at home on stage than in films. Her performance in the touring company of Mame won Holm the Sara Siddons Award -- coincidentally the same award presented to the title character at the beginning of All About Eve. Always choosy about her roles, Holm remained active through the early 2000s whenever a good part struck her fancy; one of her most frequently rebroadcast assignments was as a custody court judge in an early-1980s episode of Archie Bunker's Place and she appeared in several episodes of Touched By an Angel. She died in 2012 at the age of 95.

Trivia: Fresh-faced Austin O'Brien made his mark as a movie child star before settling into the TV series Promised Land in the latter half of the 1990s. Oregon-born O'Brien began acting as a child in TV commercials. By his pre-teens, O'Brien made the jump to films in the virtual reality thriller The Lawnmower Man (1992). O'Brien soon earned the dubious distinction, however, of starring as the boy who gets to join his action idol onscreen in the notorious Arnold Schwarzenegger flop Last Action Hero (1993). Less tarnished by the experience than his muscle-bound co-star, O'Brien soon moved on to fill Macauley Culkin's shoes as Anna Chlumskey's male foil/friend in the sequel My Girl 2 (1994). Despite appearing as the Whiz Kid in Ron Howard's esteemed space blockbuster Apollo 13 (1995), O'Brien was back to roles in young teen fare with The Babysitters' Club (1995). After starring as a young hacker pitted against the evil title character in the sequel Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996), O'Brien moved to series television when he was cast as Gerald McRaney's son in the Christian family drama Promised Land. During the series' 1996-1999 run, O'Brien also guest starred several times as his Promised Land character Josh on the hit series Touched By an Angel. After Promised Land ended, O'Brien headed to college to study his other creative passion, music.

Trivia: A graduate of San Diego State University and a veteran of the San Francisco theatre scene, Robert Hays began showing up on TV in the mid-1970s, first as co-star of the well-received television movie Young Pioneers, then in the regular role of Dr. Brad Benson on the 1979 sitcom Angie. On the basis of his dead-pan comedy performances in such films as Airplane (1980) and Take This Job and Shove It (1981), Robert Hays should have been a big-time movie star of the 1980s. Alas, the momentum of Hays' career was laid low by too many bad scripts and too many desultory TV series like Starman (1986) and FM (1989). Robert Hays remains a likeable screen presence into the 1990s, even if it's only in the occasional TV commercial or such Disney family fare as Homeward Bound: An Incredible Journey (1993).

Trivia: Colorado native Zachery Ty Bryan began his career in commercials and print ads at the age of five before getting his first big role in the 1990 made-for-TV film Crash: The Mystery of Flight 1501. His career maker came in 1991 when he was cast in the long-running sitcom Home Improvement as Brad Taylor, the oldest of the three sons, and the one prone to getting in trouble. Viewers watched Bryan grow up (and changed hair styles as frequently as sitcom dad Tim Taylor Tim Allen upgraded his power tools) in front of them as the series ran for nearly a decade. Bryan made appearances on many notable TV series, including The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Smallville, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Veronica Mars, and Cold Case. As an avid soccer player who played competitively nationally and internationally, Bryan took roles that made use of his athleticism, including a swimmer on the 2005 ESPN film Codebreakers, a football player in The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), and a baseball player in his appearance on Smallville.

Trivia: Lead actor, onscreen from the '80s.