Trivia: American actress Candice Bergen was a celebrity even before she was born. As the first child of popular radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his young wife Frances, Candice was a hot news item months before her birth, and headline material upon that blessed event (her coming into the world even prompted magazine cartoons which suggested that Edgar would try to confound the nurses by "giving" his new daughter a voice). Candice made her first public appearance as an infant, featured with her parents in a magazine advertisement. Before she was ten, Candice was appearing sporadically on dad's radio program, demonstrating a precocious ability to throw her own voice (a skill she hasn't been called upon to repeat in recent years); at 11 she and Groucho Marx's daughter Melinda were guest contestants on Groucho's TV quiz show You Bet Your Life. Candice loved her parents and luxuriated in her posh lifestyle, though she was set apart from other children in that her "brothers" were the wooden dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd - and Charlie had a bigger bedroom than she did! Like most 1960s teens, however, she rebelled against the conservatism of her parents and adopted a well-publicized, freewheeling lifestyle - and a movie career. In her first film, The Group (1965), Candice played a wealthy young lesbian - a character light years away from the sensibilities of her old-guard father. She next appeared with Steve McQueen in the big budget The Sand Pebbles (1966), simultaneously running smack dab into the unkind cuts of critics, who made the expected (given her parentage) comments concerning her "wooden" performance. Truth to tell, Candice did look far better than she acted, and this status quo remained throughout most of her film appearances of the late 1960s; even Candice admitted she wasn't much of an actress, though she allowed (in another moment that must have given papa Edgar pause) that she was terrific when required in a film to simulate an orgasm. Several films later, Candice decided to take her career more seriously than did her critics, and began emerging into a talented and reliable actress in such films as Carnal Knowledge (1971) and The Wind and the Lion (1975). Most observers agree that Candice's true turnaround was her touching but hilarious performance as a divorced woman pursuing a singing career - with little in the way of talent - in the Burt Reynolds comedy Starting Over (1979). Candice's roller-coaster offscreen life settled into relative normality when she married French film director Louis Malle; meanwhile, her acting career gained momentum as she sought out and received ever-improving movie and TV roles. In 1988, Candice began a run in the title role of the television sitcom Murphy Brown, in which she was brilliant as a mercurial, high-strung TV newsmagazine reporter, a role that won Ms. Bergen several Emmy Awards. While Murphy Brown capped Candice Bergen's full acceptance by audiences and critics as an actress of stature, it also restored her to "headline" status in 1992 - when, in direct response to the fictional Murphy Brown's decision to become a single mother, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered his notorious "family values" speech.Murphy Brown finished its successful run in 1997, and Bergen would make a handful of big-screen appearances in the ensuing years including Miss Congeniality, Sweet Home Alabama, and The In-Laws. In 2004 she became part of the cast of Boston Legal, another hit show that ran for five often award-winning seasons. When that show came to a close, she appeared in films such as The Women, Sex and the City, and Bride Wars - where she portrayed the country's leading wedding planner.

Trivia: Whenever a script called for a wacky old lady, character actor Ellen Albertini Dow was there to play the part. After a lifetime as a teacher, the Cornell graduate made her television debut on an episode of the Twilight Zone in 1985 when she was in her late sixties. She spent the rest of the '80s making TV guest appearances on family sitcoms (Mr. Belvedere, The Golden Girls, Family Matters, and Newhart, just to name a few). On the big screen, she appeared in innumerable supporting roles as a grandma, nun, or any random old lady, leading to choir parts in both Sister Act and Sister Act 2. She got to exploit her comedic shtick regularly in 1996 when she joined the cast of the Nickelodeon series Kenan & Kel in the role of Ethel Quagmire. If a cameo can be considered a breakthrough, she at least gained face recognition as the old lady, Rosie, who raps in The Wedding Singer by appearing in the film's commercial. She continued playing the sassy granny role as Disco Dottie in 54, Mrs. MacKenzie in Ready to Rumble, and Tom Green's grandma in Road Trip. In 2001, she returned to the small screen to play Grandma Harriet on the WB series Maybe It's Me. At the age of 84, she lent her voice to Adam Sandler's animated feature Eight Crazy Nights. In 2005, she played the foul-mouthed Grandma Cleary in the the box-office smash Wedding Crashers. Albertini Dow continued to work, mostly in TV guest appearances, including spots on My Name is Earl and New Girl, until 2013. She died in 2015, at age 101.

Trivia: Born in Houston in 1949, actress Loretta Devine rose to fame on-stage in the original Broadway production of Dreamgirls before parlaying her acclaim into a career in film and television. Her first major onscreen role came in 1987, when she was cast as a resident advisor on the Cosby Show-spin-off A Different World. Though she left the series after the first season, it was far from her final gig as a TV series regular.Throughout the early '90s, Devine appeared in small supporting roles in features films such as Class Act and Amos & Andrew as well as a number of TV guest spots on shows ranging from Roc to Picket Fences. In 1995, Devine's career was given a shot in the arm when she was cast as one of the leads in Waiting to Exhale, an ensemble film that proved to be a success with both critics and audiences. More supporting work followed, and in 2000 she was cast as a lead on David E. Kelley's Fox drama Boston Public, a show that would go on to be nominated for multiple Emmys over the course of its four seasons on the air.Devine's career came full-circle in 2006 when she was cast in a small role in the film adaptation of Dreamgirls, the stage musical that launched her career. The following year, she was cast as a regular on ABC's supernatural legal drama Eli Stone.In 2010 she appeared in the American remake of Death at a Funeral, the comedy Lottery Ticket, and Tyler Perry's ambitious For Colored Girls. In 2011 she appeared in Tyler Perry's Madea's Big Happy Family, and the next year she had a role on the TV series The Client List.

Trivia: The character that Gedde Watanabe is most remembered for is no doubt Long Duk Dong, the spastic foreign exchange student in Sixteen Candles (1984) whose drunken fall from a tree and laughable bastardization of the English language had ninth graders of the day rolling in theater aisles. Though a few major roles followed soon after, Watanabe ultimately fell victim to the comic typecasting machine, rendering his talents muted in favor of the stereotypical "humorous foreign-guy" roles in which he would repeatedly stumble through the cursed paces of his former footprints.It seems ironic that the actor who is remembered for these roles is a native not of Japan or some far away shore, but of Ogden, UT. Though his roles have expanded in their nature somewhat in recent years, Watanabe, a fine comic actor with a certain warm sincerity, has appeared frequently in major releases, though usually a little further down the credit list. Studying acting at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, CA, Watanabe also possesses a notable talent for crooning, appearing early on as an original cast member of Sondheim's Pacific Overtures in the 1970s.After his breakout role in Candles, Watanabe continued to riff on his likeable but mechanical Japanese-guy persona with humorous roles in UHF (1989) and, perhaps most notably, Gung-Ho (1986) and the short-lived television series of the same name that followed. Bit parts in television and film followed fairly frequently, often appearing in such television series as ER and doing voice-over work for such animated series as The Simpsons and Batman: Beyond. The late '90s showed promise for Watanabe with a couple of small yet stereotype-busting roles in Guinevere and EdTV (both 1999).

Trivia: A former theatre and psychology major at the University of Michigan, actor David Paymer's first Broadway success was in the long-running musical Grease. He tentatively launched his film career in the tiny but telling role of a cabbie in 1979's The In-Laws, then returned to working "live" as a performer and writer for The Comedy Store. A character actor even in his early twenties, Paymer displayed his versatility in a wealth of TV supporting roles on such weeklies as Cagney and Lacey, Diff'rent Strokes, The Commish and Downtown. Billy Crystal was so impressed with Paymer's work as ice-cream entrepreneur Ira Shalowitz in City Slickers (1991) that Crystal assigned him the plum role of Stan Yankelman, long-suffering brother and business manager of Berle-like comedian Buddy Young Jr., in Mister Saturday Night (1992). Convincingly playing an age range from 20 to 75, Paymer was honored with an Oscar nomination. Dividing his time between working in films and teaching classes at the Film Actor's Workshop, David Paymer has recently been seen as the angelic Hal in Heart and Souls (1993) and real-life TV producer Dan Enright in Robert Redford's Quiz Show (1994). In the decades to come, Paymer would remain an ever-present force on screen, appearing in films like In Good Company, Drag Me to Hell, Bad Teacher, and Redbelt, as well as TV shows like Line of Fire and The Good Wife.