Trivia: One of the salutary byproducts of the TV series Seinfeld is that it created a market in the '90s for sitcoms built around the comedy routines of young, hip New York comics. One of the best of these programs was Mad About You, created by and starring Manhattan-born Paul Reiser. Reiser and Seinfeld share more than a similarity of sitcoms; together with comedians Larry Miller and Mark Schiff, they comprise what has been unofficially dubbed the Four Funniest Men in the World Club, which has met for lunch each New Year's Day for the past several years. Reiser's credentials include a degree from S.U.N.Y.-Binghamton, a short stint as a health food distributor, and a 1982 film debut in Diner. Most of his film roles have been in comedies, though he was effectively cast as a greedy space traveler (who comes to a well-deserved bad end) in 1986's Aliens. Reiser has noted that his weekly series Mad About You, in which he co-starred with Helen Hunt, was based on his relationship with his wife, Paula. In 1995, Paul Reiser took a brief respite from Mad About You to star in the "single dad" comedy Bye Bye Love.As the new decade began, and Mad About You came to a close, Resier appeared in One Night at McCool's, and four years later realized a personal dream by co-starring with Peter Falk in The Thing About My Folks, a film Resier co-wrote as well. He was interviewed in The Aristocrats, and appeared as himself in Funny People. In 2011 he masterminded the very short-lived NBC sitcom The Paul Reiser Show.

Trivia: A precociously talented youngster, Helen Hunt was drawing paychecks as a television actress from the age of ten. Before she was 17, she had appeared as a regular on two series, Swiss Family Robinson (1975) and The Fitzpatricks (1977). Hunt proved she was more than just a workaday child actor with her starring performance in the fact-based 1981 TV movie The Miracle of Kathy Miller, in which she played a high school athlete who overcame severe mental and physical damage brought on by a highway accident. While she had been appearing in films as early as Rollercoaster in 1977, Hunt was never groomed as a star player, and it is possible that her resemblance to another child actress, Jodie Foster, held her back from more important roles.After taking on her first adult role in the 1982 sitcom It Takes Two, Hunt's film assignments improved, with sizable roles in Girls Just Want to Have Fun (1985), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Project X (1987), Next of Kin (1989), and The Waterdance (1991). She also gained a small measure of cult status by appearing in a brace of science fiction films, including Trancers II (1991) and Trancers III (1992). That same year, Hunt landed her longest-lasting acting assignment to date, as the co-star of the Paul Reiser-created comedy series Mad About You. During the show's seven-year run, she won both Emmy and Golden Globe awards for her portrayal of Jamie Buchman. In 1996, Hunt had her most successful film role to date in the blockbuster Twister. The following year, she topped that when she received a Best Actress Oscar for playing a caring waitress and single mother who befriends acerbic, obsessive-compulsive author Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson, who also won an Oscar for his performance) in As Good As It Gets. After Mad About You ended in 1999, Hunt appeared in films by several veteran directors, including Robert Zemeckis (Cast Away [2000]), Robert Altman (Dr. T and The Women [2000]), and Woody Allen (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion [2001]). She starred in Life x 3 on Broadway in 2003.In 2005, Hunt joined the star-studded cast of HBO's two-part miniseries Empire Falls in the role of Janine, ex-wife of Miles (Ed Harris), the story's central character. The actress made her feature directorial debut in Then She Found Me (for which Hunt also starred, produced, and wrote the screenplay), an adaptation of Elinore Lipman's best-selling novel of the same name. The story follows a Philadelphia schoolteacher (Hunt) whose long-lost birth mother (Bette Miller) reappears at just as her daughter is careening into a midlife crisis. Hunt played a supportive mother in Soul Surfer (2011), an inspirational drama based on the true tale of a surfer who returned to the sport after tragically losing an arm. In 2012 she played a sex surrogate helping a man in an iron lung lose his virginity for director Ben Lewin in The Sessions, a part that earned her rave reviews and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Trivia: Raised outside of Chicago as the sixth of nine children, including older brother James, a founding member of the band Chicago. Left college in his junior year after seeing David Mamet's play, The American Buffalo, which inspired Pankow to enroll in the two-year training program at Chicago's St. Nicholas Theatre. Performed on Broadway (in his first stint) in Serious Money, The Iceman Cometh and as Mozart in Amadeus. Appeared in a numerous films of the late 1980s-early '90s, including To Live and Die in L.A., Talk Radio and Mortal Thoughts. Most recognized for his role as Ira Buchman, cousin of Paul Reiser's character, on the '90s NBC sitcom Mad About You. Returned to Broadway in the 2000s, performing in Twelve Angry Men, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Cymbeline. Took over the role of Merc Lapidus (from Thomas Haden Church) in 2011 on the Showtime/BBC show Episodes.

Trivia: A natural-born actress who received her primary training in the foyer of her parents' home, Leila Kenzle has since moved on to brighten the lights of Broadway and bask in the warm glow of television and film. Born in Patchogue (Long Island), NY, and raised by an electrical supplies salesman and an antique dealer in nearby Rutherford, NJ, Kenzle was the one of three daughters who often entertained houseguests with her energetic antics. After deciding to expand her talents beyond the realm of home dinner theater, Kenzle earned her B.F.A. in theater from the Mason Gross School of the Arts Conservatory at Rutgers. As with many others in her field, the burgeoning talent found the demanding life of an actress too much to bear and promptly withdrew from the stage, finding work as a hotel phone operator. Encouraged by a sympathetic casting director to follow her dreams and go in for an audition, Kenzle landed her first off-Broadway role and has since never looked back. Following a breakthrough role in the off-Broadway hit Tony 'n Tina's Wedding, the newly confident actress soon relocated to Los Angeles and quickly landed roles in no less than five television pilots. Her television career on a role, Kenzle appeared in such popular series as The Golden Girls, thirtysomething, and Mad About You. Her exposure growing, it wasn't long before Kenzle was making the leap to films with roles in Other People's Money (1991) and Dogmatic (1996). The new millennium found Kenzle landing roles in such popular features as White Oleander and the Rob Schneider comedy The Hot Chick (both 2002). Married to acting coach Neil Monaco in April of 1994, Kenzle often dedicated her time off-camera to work with the Children's International Institute and working with multiple sclerosis charities. With the release of the award-winning short film Bigger Fish, the established actress branched out to receive her first producer's credit.

Trivia: American character actor Vito Scotti may not be the living legend as described by his publicity packet, but he has certainly been one of the most familiar faces to bob up on small and large screens in the last five decades. Scotti's father was a vaudeville impresario, and his mother an opera singer; in fact, he was born while his mother was making a personal appearance in San Francisco. Launching his own career at seven with an Italian-language commedia del arte troupe in New York, Scotti picked up enough improvisational knowhow to develop a nightclub act. When the once-flourishing Italian theatre circuit began to fade after World War II, Scotti began auditioning for every job that came up -- whether he could do the job or not. Without his trademarked mustache, the diminuitive actor looked like a juvenile well into his thirties, and as such was cast in a supporting role as a timorous East Indian on the "Gunga Ram" segment of the '50s TV kiddie series Andy's Gang. Once the producers discovered that Scotti had mastered several foreign dialects, he was allowed to appear as a comic foil to Andy's Gang's resident puppet Froggy the Gremlin. In nighttime television, Scotti played everything from a murderous bank robber (on Steve Canyon) to a misplaced Japanese sub commander (on Gilligan's Island). He was indispensable to TV sitcoms: Scotti starred during the 1954 season of Life with Luigi (replacing J. Carroll Naish), then appeared as gesticulating Latin types in a score of comedy programs, notably The Dick Van Dyke Show (as eccentric Italian housepainter Vito Giotto) and The Flying Nun (as ever-suspicious Puerto Rican police captain Gaspar Fomento). In theatrical films, Scotti's appearances were brief but memorable. he is always greeted with appreciative audience laughter for his tiny bit as a restauranteur in The Godfather (1972); while in How Sweet it Is (1968) he is hilarious as a moonstruck chef, so overcome by the sight of bikini-clad Debbie Reynolds that he begins kissing her navel! Vito Scotti was still essaying dialect parts into the '90s.

Trivia: Started her professional acting career in 1974.At the start of her career, learned to type to work in offices while also auditioning in New York.In 2008, was awarded the School of Theatre Distinguished Alumni Award by the Boston University College of Fine Arts.Has played a teacher in multiple projects, including Lean on Me (1989), If Looks Could Kill (1991), Curb Your Enthusiasm and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.In 2016, was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Female for her work in the film H. (2014).

Trivia: With his giraffe-like countenance and unusually tall haircut, American musician/actor Lyle Lovett may look like the archetypal rube, but don't be fooled: he is well educated (he earned journalism and foreign language degrees from Texas A&M), extremely articulate, and highly disciplined. Achieving his first big success in the mid-1980s, Lovett successfully straddled two musical forms on the verge of renewed popularity, folk-rock and country. Lovett also proved himself an adept actor with important roles in three Robert Altman films, The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), and Ready to Wear (1994), a reputation he has sustained in a handful of TV guest star shots. Lovett found himself the reluctant recipient of gaudy publicity hype in 1993 when he married movie superstar Julia Roberts, a union that disintegrated (thanks in no small part to incessant and intrusive press coverage) less than two years later. He would go on to make occasional acting appearances in movies like Three Days of Rain and on TV shows like Castle.

Trivia: Supporting actress, onscreen from the '70s.

Trivia: Educated at Roosevelt University, bearded, booming-voiced Louis Zorich has been a working actor for nearly 50 years. Zorich made his off-Broadway debut in a revival of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, and has appeared on Broadway in Becket, Moby Dick, Hadrian VII, and Moonchildren. He also appeared as Ben in Dustin Hoffman's 1984 staging of Death of a Salesman, repeating this role in the 1985 film version. On television, Zorich has been seen as Jules Berger in Brooklyn Bridge (1991) and as Paul Reiser's father in Mad About You (which ran from 1992 to 1999), and heard in innumerable commercial voice-overs. Louis Zorich is the husband of Oscar-winning actress Olympia Dukakis.

Trivia: Stocky, blondish character actor John Karlen gained a mid-1966s following as Willie Loomis (and several other roles) on the Gothic TV soap opera Dark Shadows. Thereafter, Karlen became a fixture in other Dan Curtis productions, appearing in such feature-length Curtis endeavors as House of Dark Shadows (1970) and Trilogy of Terror (1973). In 1987, Karlen won an Emmy for his portrayal of Harvey Lacey, the contractor husband of Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly), on the TV series Cagney and Lacey (1982-88); two years later he co-starred on the less successful video weekly Snoops. John Karlen's TV movie credits include the role of Jerry Barr in the execrable Roseanne: An Unauthorized Biography (1994).

Trivia: Trained for her craft at Illinois' Northwestern University, North Carolina-born actress Penny Fuller made a name for herself on Broadway in the mid-to-late '60s. After appearing in Barefoot in the Park, Cabaret, and a handful of Shakespeare productions, Fuller won critical plaudits for her portrayal of the outwardly sweet but inwardly subversive Eve Harrington in Applause, the 1970 musical version of All About Eve. After this starmaking turn, Fuller found herself typed in films and TV as schemers and "steel magnolias." In addition to her many TV-movie appearances, Fuller has had regular roles on three series: The Edge of Night (early '70s) Bare Essence (1983) and Fortune Dane (1986). She won an Emmy for her performance in the 1982 TV staging of The Elephant Man. More recently, Penny Fuller has appeared as Mrs. Drysdale in the 1993 filmization of The Beverly Hillbillies and has periodically shown up as Helen Hunt's mother on the NBC sitcom Mad About You.