Trivia: At first intending to become a minister, actor/monologist Andy Griffith (born June 1st, 1926) became active with the Carolina Playmakers, the prestigious drama-and-music adjunct of the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill. He spent several seasons portraying Sir Walter Raleigh in the summertime outdoor drama The Lost Colony, spending the rest of the years as a schoolteacher. Griffith continued performing fitfully as an after-dinner speaker on the men's club circuit, developing hilariously bucolic routines on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to football. Under the aegis of agent/producer Richard O. Linke, Griffith returned to acting, attaining stardom in the role of bumptious Air Force rookie Will Stockdale in the TV and Broadway productions of No Time For Sergeants. Before committing Sergeants to film, Griffith made his movie debut in director Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, in which he portrayed an outwardly folksy but inwardly vicious TV personality (patterned, some say, after Arthur Godfrey).After filming Face in the Crowd, No Time for Sergeants and Onionhead for Warner Bros. during the years 1957 and 1958, Griffith starred in a 1959 Broadway musical version of Destry Rides Again; as an added source of income, Griffith ran a North Carolina supermarket. On February 15, 1960 he first appeared as Andy Taylor, the laid-back sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina, on an episode of The Danny Thomas Show. This one-shot was of course the pilot film for the Emmy-winning The Andy Griffith Show, in which Griffith starred from 1960 through 1968. Eternally easygoing on camera, Griffith, who owned 50% of the series, ruled his sitcom set with an iron hand, though he was never as hard on the other actors as he was on himself; to this day, he remains close to fellow Griffith stars Don Knotts and Ron Howard. An unsuccessful return to films with 1969's Angel in My Pocket was followed by an equally unsuccessful 1970 TV series Headmaster. For the next 15 years, Griffith confined himself to guest-star appearances, often surprising his fans by accepting cold-blooded villainous roles. In 1985, he made a triumphal return to series television in Matlock, playing a folksy but very crafty Southern defense attorney. A life-threatening disease known as Gillian-Barre syndrome curtailed his activities in the late 1980s, but as of 1995 Andy Griffith was still raking in the ratings with his infrequent Matlock two-hour specials. The actor worked on and off throughout the late nineties and early 2000s, and co-starred with Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion in the romantic comedy Waitress in 2007.

Trivia: A graduate of NYU, American actor Richard Masur has been seen in supporting TV and movie roles since the early 1970s. His pliable facial features, boyish demeanor and indeterminate age have enabled Masur to play a rich variety of roles: a mentally retarded stockboy on All in the Family, a hotshot program manager on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and even a "friendly stranger" child molester in the 1981 TV movie Fallen Angel. Masur's film credits include Semi-Tough (1977); Who'll Stop the Rain (1978); My Girl (1991), as Jamie Lee Curtis' prickly ex-husband; and the deservedly maligned Heaven's Gate (1980). Masur has also been a regular on several TV series: From 1975 through 1976, for example, he was divorcee Bonnie Franklin's much-younger boyfriend (and almost her second husband) on One Day at a Time. In 1987, Masur made his film directorial bow with the Oscar-nominated short subject Love Struck, but he continues to work primarily as an actor in both TV and film.

Trivia: African American leading lady Lynn Whitfield made her film bow in 1983's Dr. Detroit. Three years later, the Louisiana born and bred Whitfield played the title character in the fact-based TV movie Johnnie Mae Gibson: FBI, the story of the first black female FBI agent. After gaining recognition for her work in a number of TV dramas, including The Women of Brewster Place (1990), Whitfield won an Emmy award and international acclaim for her starring performance in the HBO biopic The Josephine Baker Story in 1991. Whitfield subsequently split her efforts between TV and film, doing particularly strong work in Kasi Lemmons' much-feted Eve's Bayou (1997) as a family matriarch struggling with her husband's infidelity. In 1999, she earned an NAACP Image Award nomination for her work in Oprah Winfrey Presents: The Wedding, a 1950s drama in which she was cast as the wealthy mother of a young woman (Halle Berry) intent on marrying a poor white musician.

Trivia: Dour, lantern-jawed character actor John Anderson attended the University of Iowa before inaugurating his performing career on a Mississippi showboat. After serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, Anderson made his Broadway bow, then first appeared on screen in 1952's The Crimson Pirate. The actor proved indispensable to screenwriters trafficking in such stock characters as The Vengeful Gunslinger, The Inbred Hillbilly Patriarch, The Scripture-Spouting Zealot and The Rigid Authority Figure. Anderson's many screen assignments included used-car huckster California Charlie in Psycho (1960), the implicitly incestuous Elder Hammond in Ride the High Country (1962), the title character in The Lincoln Conspiracy (1977) and Caiaphas in In Search of Historic Jesus (1980). A dead ringer for 1920s baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Anderson portrayed that uncompromising gentleman twice, in 1988's Eight Men Out and the 1991 TV biopic Babe Ruth. A veteran of 500 TV appearances (including four guest stints on The Twilight Zone), John Anderson was seen as FDR in the 1978 miniseries Backstairs in the White House, and on a regular basis as Michael Spencer Hudson in the daytime drama Another World, Virgil Earp in The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61) and the leading man's flinty father in MacGiver (1985-92).

Trivia: Connecticut native Linda Purl grew up in Japan, where her father, a Union Carbide executive, had been transferred. Under the watchful eye of her mother, a former ballerina, Purl began acting professionally in Japanese stage and TV productions at the age of seven. Ten years later, she made her American film debut in Jory (1972). Never a conventional ingenue, she has played everything from mentally retarded teens to rape victims to psychotic killers, as well as a few real-life personalities like Alice Roosevelt Longworth and globetrotting journalist Nellie Bly. Purl has the distinction of playing two different recurring characters on the same television series. During the 1974-75 season of Happy Days, she was seen as Richie Cunningham's (Ron Howard) high-school girlfriend Gloria; she returned to the series in 1982 as Ashler Pfister, a divorced mother with whom Fonzie (Henry Winkler) was briefly involved romantically. Linda has also appeared regularly on such series as The Secret Storm and Beacon Hill; more recently, she played an assistant DA put in charge of a group of young ex-convicts on the syndicated weekly adventure series Robin's Hoods (1994). Linda Purl was at one time married to Desi Arnaz Jr..

Trivia: Lead actor, onscreen from 1985.

Trivia: Having made her feature film debut in Sex and the College Girl (1964), blonde actress Julie Sommars went on to appear in television movies of the '70s and in the occasional feature film through the mid-'80s. Fans of the television drama Matlock (1986-1995) will recognize her for playing Julie March.

Trivia: Sturdy, reliable character player Kene Holliday specialized in portrayals of vociferous everymen, with a strong emphasis on television work. Holliday landed one of his first major roles in the small-screen blockbuster Roots: The Next Generations (as Detroit, one of the direct descendants of the iconic Kunta Kinte), and subsequently divided his time between occasional big-screen features (No Small Affair, The Philadelphia Experiment), series work (with many appearances on Matlock), and TV movies, such as the 1988 Dangerous Company. Holliday tackled a rare yet effective lead role in the much-anticipated 2007 drama Great World of Sound, as Clarence, a well-meaning record producer in training who discovers that his parent company isn't exactly all that it professes to be.

Trivia: Made her professional acting debut in a production of the musical A Chorus Line on Broadway playing Diana Morales.Notably played half-human, half-Klingon Lieutenant B'Elanna Torres on the show Star Trek: Voyager over the entirety of the series' run from 1995 to 2001.Co-wrote the Tenebrea novel trilogy – Entering Tenebrea, Tenebrea's Hope and Tenebrea Rising – with Daniel Graham.

Trivia: Leading actor Joe Dallesandro gained more than his 15 minutes of fame in the '60s and '70s thanks to his presence in the experimental films of Andy Warhol. Most often cast as androgynous characters, Dallesandro was the star of the Warhol/Paul Morrissey trilogy Flesh, Trash, and Heat, and later played the title roles in the selfsame production team's Blood for Dracula and Flesh for Frankenstein for which Dallesandro was praised by the cognoscenti for his "naturalistic" performances. After making his "mainstream" debut in The Gardener, he worked extensively in Europe. He made fleeting appearances as Lucky Luciano in Coppola's The Cotton Club (1984) and as the father of Darren E. Burrows in John Waters' Cry-Baby (1991). Dallesandro has also been prominently featured in such TV weeklies of the 1980s as Fortune Dane, Wiseguy, and The Hollywood Detective.

Trivia: A dark-haired young leading man of the 1950s, Scott Marlowe excelled in playing juvenile delinquents, a Hollywood stable following the death of James Dean. The founder of Los Angeles' Theatre West, Marlowe also appeared on such television shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Gunsmoke, The FBI, T.J. Hooker, Murder She Wrote, as well as scores of made-for-television movies.

Trivia: Rotund character actor Allen Garfield was trained at the Actors Studio. He interrupted a fruitful stage career in 1968 to appear in a string of low-budget, Manhattan-based films, among them the seminal Brian de Palma project Hi, Mom! (1970) and Woody Allen's Bananas (1971, as the Christ figure who has trouble finding a parking space for his cross). He was promoted to leading man in 1970's Cry Uncle, a raunchy R-rated detective spoof which attracted extensive press coverage thanks to the scene in which Garfield has sex with a corpse! In mainstream films like The Long Goodbye (1973) The Conversation (1974) and Nashville (1975), Garfield was generally cast as slimy executives and promoters. As MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer in Gable and Lombard, Garfield offered a fascinating amalgam of sticky sentimentality, sharp business acumen and cold-blooded ruthlessness. From 1978 through 1983, Garfield billed himself under his given name of Allen Goorwitz, and also lost a great deal of weight; but with 1984's Cotton Club onward, it was back to "Garfield" and excess poundage. In 1993, Allen Garfield played his first starring role in years in the angst-driven theatrical feature Jack and His Friends.

Trivia: Lead actress Cherie Currie has appeared on screen since the '80s.