Trivia: The eldest of six sisters, Michael Learned spent her first decade on her family's farm in Connecticut. When she was 11, Learned moved to Austria, where her father worked for the U.S. State Department. While attending boarding school in England, she discovered the theater, and decided to make it her life's work. At 16, she married actor Peter Donat, a union that lasted until 1972. Dividing her time between stage acting and raising her sons, she appeared in Canadian and American Shakespeare Festival, and for several years was associated with San Francisco's American Conservatory Theatre. While appearing in a production of Noel Coward's Private Lives, Learned was selected by John Rich to play Olivia Walton on his upcoming TV series The Waltons (she replaced Patricia Neal, who starred as Olivia in the 1971 pilot film The Homecoming). She remained with The Waltons until 1980, winning three Emmies in the process. In 1981, she was starred as Mary Benjamin in her own series, Nurse (1981-82), which earned her a fourth Emmy. Hoping to distance herself from the Olivia Walton image, she went to play Dr. Marie Teller in the 1988 weekly Hothouse and model agency head Trish Carlin in Living Dolls (1989). She also appeared in such theatrical features as Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993) and such made-for-TV specials as All My Sons (1986). Eventually, however, Michael Learned returned to the Waltons fold in a 1995 TV-movie reunion.

Trivia: Before entering the entertainment industry, actor, producer, scriptwriter, playwright and stage director John Houseman, born Jacques Haussmann, first worked for his father's grain business after graduating from college, then began writing magazine pieces and translating plays from German and French. Living in New York, he was writing, directing, and producing plays by his early 30s; soon he had a stellar reputation on Broadway. In 1937, he and Orson Welles founded the Mercury Theater, at which he produced and directed radio specials and stage presentations; at the same time he was a teacher at Vassar. He produced Welles's never-completed first film, Too Much Johnson (1938). Houseman then went on to play a crucial role in the packaging of Welles's first completed film, the masterpiece Citizen Kane (1941): he developed the original story with Herman Mankiewicz, motivated Mankiewicz to complete the script, and worked as a script editor and general advisor for the film. Shortly afterwards, he and Welles had a falling out and Houseman became a vice president of David O. Selznick Productions, a post he quit in late 1941 (after Pearl Harbor) to become chief of the overseas radio division of the OWI. After returning to Hollywood he produced many fine films and commuted to New York to produce and direct Broadway plays and TV specials; in all, the films he produced were nominated for 20 Oscars and won seven. Later he became the artistic director of the touring repertory group the Acting Company, with which he toured successfully in the early '70s. He debuted onscreen at the age of 62 in Seven Days in May (1964), and then in the '70s and '80s played character roles in a number of films. As an actor he was best known as Kingsfield, the stern Harvard law professor, in the film The Paper Chase (1973), his second screen appearance, for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar; he reprised the role in the TV series of the same name. He authored two autobiographies, Run-Through (1972) and Front and Center (1979).

Trivia: Burly character actor Ramon Bieri made his first professional stage appearance in 1954. A film performer from 1970, Bieri has often shown up as rednecks and rabblerousers. One of his best-remembered screen assignments was also one of his smallest: as the strong-arm police captain in Warren Beatty's Reds, Bieri responded to Beatty's explanatory "I write" by growling "No...you wrong!" A more affable Bieri was seen as Babe Ruth in the 1977 TV movie A Love Affair: The Eleanor and Lou Gehrig Story. Ramon Bieri's many TV-series credits include the starring role of Detroit blue-collar worker Joe Wabash in Joe's World (1979-1980).

Trivia: Long-time character actor James Cromwell has spent much of his career on stage and television, only occasionally appearing in feature films until the early '90s, when his film work began to flourish. The tall, spare actor first became known to an international audience with his role as the taciturn but kindly Farmer Hoggett, the owner of a piglet that wants to be a sheepdog, in the smash hit Babe (1995). His work in the film earned Cromwell an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, as well as numerous opportunities for steady work in Hollywood.The son of noted director John Cromwell and actress Kay Johnson, he originally aspired to become a mechanical engineer, attending both Vermont's Middlebury College and the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). But after a summer spent on a movie set with his father, the acting bug bit, and Cromwell decided to become an actor. He started out in regional theater, acting and directing in a variety productions for ten years, and he was a regular performer at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Cromwell made his television debut in the recurring role of "Stretch" Cunningham on All in the Family in 1974, and he subsequently spent the rest of the decade and much of the 1980s on television, as a regular on such shows as Hot L Baltimore and The Last Precinct. Cromwell also appeared in such miniseries as NBC's Once an Eagle and in such made-for-television movies as A Christmas Without Snow (1980). Cromwell made his feature film debut in the comedy Murder By Death (1976). His film work was largely undistinguished until Babe; following the film's success, he began appearing in more substantial roles in a number of popular films, including The People Vs. Larry Flynt (1996), in which he played Charles Keating; Star Trek: First Contact (1996), which cast him as the reluctant scientist responsible for Earth's first contact with alien life forms; and L.A. Confidential (1997), in which he gave a marvelously loathsome performance as a crooked police captain. Adept at playing nice guys and bottom-dwelling scum alike, Cromwell next earned strong notices for his portrayal of a penitentiary warden in The Green Mile (1999).The respected character actor continued strongly into the next decade with appearances in Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys as well as the live-on-TV production of Fail Safe in 2000. He enjoyed a recurring role on E.R. in 2001. He played the president in the 2002 Jack Ryan movie The Sum of All Fears. In 2003 he took on a recurring role in the respected HBO drama Six Feet Under, and also appeared in the award-winning HBO adaptation of Angels in America. In 2006 he acted opposite Helen Mirren playing Prince Philip in The Queen, and played another head of state for Oliver Stone when he portrayed George Herbert Walker Bush in the biopic W. In 2011 he was the loyal butler to the main character in the Best Picture Oscar winner for that year, The Artist.

Trivia: Actress/screenwriter Valerie Curtin began her acting career on the New York stage, making her film bow as Vera in 1975's Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore. Seldom rising above the supporting-player ranks, Curtin has been more artistically satisfied by her scriptwriting work, winning an Oscar nomination for 1979's ...And Justice For All. This project, like many others, was a collaborative effort between Curtin and her director/writer husband Barry Levinson. Valerie Curtin's TV work has included a season as a regular on the comedy variety series The Jim Stafford Show (1975), and the regular role of Judy Bernley on the 1982 sitcom version of the feature film 9 to 5 (the same role played by Jane Fonda in the original movie). Curtin is the daughter of Joseph Curtin, a radio actor best known for his portrayal of Nick Charles on The Adventures of the Thin Man and of Peter Galway on the daytime serial Our Gal Sunday. She is also the cousin of Saturday Night Live veteran Jane Curtin.

Trivia: Essentially a stage actress, Michigan-born Ruth Nelson appeared sporadically in films from her first movie appearance in Of Human Bondage (1934) to her last in Awakenings (1990). Few of Ms. Nelson's roles were large enough to afford attention from critics -- notable exceptions were the 1943 wartime drama North Star and the 1947 Tracy /Hepburn vehicle Sea of Grass -- and unfortunately she made few TV appearances, so it's hard to provide anyone unfamiliar with her work a frame of reference. She did, however, pop up frequently as a peripheral interview subject during the late-'70s heyday of director Robert Altman. Ms. Nelson had married another director, John Cromwell, in 1946, and both Mr. and Mrs. Cromwell acted together in Altman's 1978 film A Wedding. Fans who tried to grill Cromwell on his own film accomplishments (Anna and the King of Siam, Dead Reckoning, et al.) were obliged to filter their request through Ruth Nelson, who was able to "interpret" her husband's nods, shrugs and snorts of disapproval.

Trivia: Born in Vicksburg, MS, in 1920, actress Beah Richards studied at Dillard University in New Orleans before pursuing an acting career on-stage in New York City. She appeared in Louis S. Peterson's off-Broadway play Take a Giant Step and in the film adaptation in 1959. In 1965, she received a Tony nomination for her role as Sister Margaret in James Baldwin's play The Amen Corner, and two years later she received an Academy Award nomination for her supporting role as Sidney Poitier's mother in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. She continued playing matriarch characters in the feature films Hurry Sundown, In the Heat of the Night, and The Great White Hope. During the '70s, she took over for Lillian Randolph as Bill Cosby's mother on The Bill Cosby Show, played Aunt Ethel on Sanford and Son, and played several grandmotherly characters in made-for-TV movies. More television appearances followed in the '80s, with recurring roles on Designing Women, Beauty and the Beast, Hill Street Blues, Roots: The Next Generations, and L.A. Law. In 1987, she received her first Emmy award for playing Olive Varden on Frank's Place. She has also directed plays at the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center, appeared in her own one-woman show, and published several plays and novels, including the poetry collection A Black Woman Speaks and Other Poems. After playing the substance abuse counselor in Gus Van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy, she made a bit of a comeback as Dr. Benton's (Eriq LaSalle) mother on the NBC medical drama ER and as Grandma Baby in Jonathan Demme's Beloved, based on the novel by Toni Morrison. She received an Emmy for her final television appearance as Gertrude Turner on the ABC drama The Practice. She died of emphysema in 2000.