Trivia: Born Leonard Rosenberg, Randall moved to New York at age 19 and studied theater with Sanford Meisner and at the Neighborhood Playhouse. His stage debut was in The Circle of Chalk (1941). From 1942-46 he served with the U.S. Army, following which he acted on radio and TV. He began appearing onscreen in 1957 and was a fairly busy film actor through the mid '60s. He is best known for his work on TV, particularly for his portrayal of fastidious Felix Unger on the sitcom "The Odd Couple." He also starred or costarred in the series "One Man's Family," "Mr. Peepers," "The Tony Randall Show," and "Love, Sidney." He frequently appears on TV talk shows, where he is witty, erudite, and urbane. In 1991 he created the National Actors Theater, a repertory company; its purpose is to bring star-filled classic plays to broad-based audiences at low prices.

Trivia: Commenting on his notorious on-set irascibility in 1977, Jack Klugman replied that he was merely "taking Peter Falk lessons from Robert Blake," invoking the names of two other allegedly hard-to-please TV stars. Klugman grew up in Philadelphia, and after taking in a 1939 performance by New York's Group Theatre, Klugman decided that an actor's life was right up his alley. He majored in drama at Carnegie Tech and studied acting at the American Theatre Wing before making his (non-salaried) 1949 stage-debut at the Equity Library Theater. While sharing a New York flat with fellow hopeful Charles Bronson, Klugman took several "grub" jobs to survive, at one point selling his blood for $85 a pint. During television's so-called Golden Age, Klugman appeared in as many as 400 TV shows. He made his film debut in 1956, and three years later co-starred with Ethel Merman in the original Broadway production of Gypsy. In 1964, Klugman won the first of his Emmy awards for his performance in "Blacklist," an episode of the TV series The Defenders; that same year, he starred in his first sitcom, the 13-week wonder Harris Against the World. Far more successful was his next TV series, The Odd Couple, which ran from 1970 through 1974; Klugman won two Emmies for his portrayal of incorrigible slob Oscar Madison (he'd previously essayed the role when he replaced Walter Matthau in the original Broadway production of the Neil Simon play). It was during Odd Couple's run that the network "suits" got their first real taste of Klugman's savage indignation, when he and co-star Tony Randall threatened to boycott the show unless the idiotic laughtrack was removed (Klugman and Randall won that round; from 1971 onward, Odd Couple was filmed before a live audience). It was but a foretaste of things to come during Klugman's six-year (1977-83) reign as star of Quincy, M.E.. Popular though Klugman was in the role of the crusading, speechifying LA County Coroner's Office medical examiner R. Quincy, he hardly endeared himself to the producers when he vented his anger against their creative decisions in the pages of TV Guide. Nor was he warmly regarded by the Writer's Guild when he complained about the paucity of high-quality scripts (he wrote several Quincy episodes himself, with mixed results). After Quincy's cancellation, Klugman starred in the Broadway play I'm Not Rappaport and co-starred with John Stamos in the 1986 sitcom You Again?. The future of Klugman's career -- and his future, period -- was sorely threatened when he underwent throat surgery in 1989. He'd been diagnosed with cancer of the larynx as early as 1974, but at that time was able to continue working after a small growth was removed. For several years after the 1989 operation, Klugman was unable to speak, though he soon regained this ability. He continued working through 2011, and died the following year at age 90.

Trivia: Elinor Donahue's mother, a theatrical costumer, moonlighted as a department store saleswoman in order to pay for her daughter's dancing lessons. Appearing in dancing-chorus film roles from the age of five, Donahue was at one point a ballet-school classmate of future Fred Astaire partner Barrie Chase. Striking out on her own at 12, Donahue attained work as a Las Vegas showgirl at 14; the fact that she was underage was discreetly covered by her agent and her co-workers, who took a paternal interest in the impressionable young dancer's career. Breaking her ankle at 16, Donahue decided to forego dancing in favor of acting; she was almost immediately cast in the role of sensitive teenager Betty Anderson in the long-running (1954-60) sitcom Father Knows Best. It was the first of many TV stints for Donahue; over the next three decades she would appear as a regular on such series as The Andy Griffith Show, Many Happy Returns, The Odd Couple, Mulligan's Stew, Please Stand By and Doctor's Private Lives. She became a special favorite of writer/director Savage Steve Holland, who cast Donahue as the ditsy mother of a teen-aged secret agent on the 1987 Fox network series The New Adventures of Beans Baxter, and as the voice of a suburban mom who spends her waking hours trying to learn an indecipherable foreign language on Holland's cartoon series Eek! The Cat. This fey, eccentric quality was carried over into Donahue's performance as the eternally bathrobe-clad wife of Bob Elliot and mother of 30-year-old paperboy Chris Elliot on the 1990 Fox sitcom Get a Life. Donahue's film appearances have been less frequent; when she showed up in a cameo as a department store clerk in Gary Marshall's Pretty Women (1987), there was an audible appreciative sigh of recognition from movie audiences everywhere. Elinor Donahue was the wife of Columbia TV executive Harry Ackerman from 1961 to Ackerman's death in 1991.