Trivia: Best known as the rumpled television detective Columbo, character actor Peter Falk also enjoyed a successful film career, often in association with the groundbreaking independent filmmaker John Cassavetes. Born September 16, 1927, in New York City, Falk lost an eye at the age of three, resulting in the odd, squinting gaze which later became his trademark. He initially pursued a career in public administration, serving as an efficiency expert with the Connecticut Budget Bureau, but in the early '50s, boredom with his work sparked an interest in acting. By 1955, Falk had turned professional, and an appearance in a New York production of The Iceman Cometh earned him much attention. He soon graduated to Broadway and in 1958 made his feature debut in the Nicholas Ray/Budd Schulberg drama Wind Across the Everglades.A diminutive, stocky, and unkempt presence, Falk's early screen roles often portrayed him as a blue-collar type or as a thug; it was as the latter in 1960's Murder Inc. that he earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, a major career boost. He was nominated in the same category the following year as well, this time as a sarcastic bodyguard in Frank Capra's Pocketful of Miracles. In 1962, Falk won an Emmy for his work in the television film The Price of Tomatoes, a presentation of the Dick Powell Theater series. The steady stream of accolades made him a hot property, and he next starred in the 1962 feature Pressure Point. A cameo in Stanley Kramer's 1963 smash It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World preceded Falk's appearance in the Rat Pack outing Robin and the Seven Hoods, but the film stardom many predicted for him always seemed just out of reach, despite lead roles in 1965's The Great Race and 1967's Luv.In 1968, Falk first assumed the role of Columbo, the disheveled police lieutenant whose seemingly slow and inept investigative manner masked a steel-trap mind; debuting in the TV movie Prescription: Murder, the character was an immediate hit, and after a second telefilm, Ransom for a Dead Man, a regular Columbo series premiered as part of the revolving NBC Mystery Movie anthology in the fall of 1971, running for seven years and earning Falk a second Emmy in the process. In the meantime, he also continued his film career, most notably with Cassavetes; in 1970, Falk starred in the director's Husbands, and in 1974 they reunited for the brilliant A Woman Under the Influence. In between the two pictures, Falk also returned to Broadway, where he won a Tony award for his performance in the 1972 Neil Simon comedy The Prisoner of Second Avenue. In 1976, Cassavetes joined him in front of the camera to co-star in Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky, and directed him again in 1977's Opening Night.After Columbo ceased production in 1978, Falk starred in the Simon-penned mystery spoof The Cheap Detective, followed by the William Friedkin caper comedy The Brink's Job (1978). After 1979's The In-Laws, he starred two years later in ...All the Marbles, but was then virtually absent from the screen for the next half decade. Cassavetes' 1986 effort Big Trouble brought Falk back to the screen (albeit on a poor note; Cassavetes later practically disowned the embarrassing film) and and in 1987 he starred in Happy New Year along with the Rob Reiner cult favorite The Princess Bride. An appearance as himself in Wim Wenders' masterful Wings of Desire in 1988 preceded his 1989 resumption of the Columbo character for another regular series; the program was to remain Falk's focus well into the next decade, with only a handful of film appearances in pictures including 1990's Tune in Tomorrow and a cameo in Robert Altman's The Player. After the cancellation of Columbo, he next turned up in Wenders' Desire sequel Far Away, So Close before starring in the 1995 comedy Roommates. Falk continued to work in both film and television for the next decade and a half, starring in various Columbo specials through 2003, appearing with Woody Allen in the made-for-TV The Sunshine Boys in 1997, and playing a bar owner caught up in mafia dealings in 1999's The Money Kings. Other projects included the Adam Sandler-produced gangster comedy Corky Romano (2001), the Dreamworks animated family film A Shark Tale (as the voice of Ira Feinberg), and the Paul Reiser-scripted, Raymond de Felitta-directed comedy-drama The Thing About My Folks (2005). In 2007, Falk starred opposite Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore in Lee Tamahori's sci-fi thriller Next. That same year, Falk announced to the public that he had Alzheimer's disease. He died in June 2011 at age 83.

Trivia: Multi-talented Billy Connolly is a world-famous comic, an actor on stage, screen, and television, a playwright, and a folk musician. Connolly was born on the kitchen floor of a Glasgow tenement in 1942. During the war, his father William joined the Royal Air Force and due to the stress of separation, his marriage to Connolly's mother disintegrated, leaving William in charge of raising Connolly and his little sister, Flo. He in turn sent the children to live with his two sisters, which made for a difficult home life as they resented their new responsibilities. At age 15, Connolly left school and worked as a delivery boy at a bookstore and then a bakery until he was old enough to work in the shipyards. In 1960, Connolly began a five-year welding apprenticeship. He left in the early '60s to join the Parachute regiment of the Territorial Army and during his stint completed 17 parachute jumps. After leaving the military, he finished his welding apprenticeship and took a job constructing an oil rig in Biafra, Nigeria. The work was unpleasant and eventually he returned to Glasgow.An episode of The Beverly Hillbillies inspired Connolly to buy a banjo and, following experience in other folky bands, founded the Humblebums with guitarist Tam Harvey. They were later joined by pop singer Gerry Rafferty. Their music, coupled with Connolly's joke-telling between songs, led to considerable popularity, and the Humblebums enjoyed the wild life of touring, partying, and doing everything excessively. Due to his growing tendency to dominate their concerts with comedy, he and Rafferty had a falling out and the group disbanded in 1971 while they were in London. Connolly stayed and worked on his comedy career. By 1975, he had become a roaring success and was touring like a madman. In 1977, he wrote his first play, the unsuccessful An' Me Wi' A Bad Leg, Tae. Actually, none of his subsequent plays were as successful as his irreverent and sometimes coarse standup routines. In 1979, Connolly made his film debut in Absolution, a drama starring Richard Burton. By the 1980s, Connolly had become a superstar in the U.K. and was having trouble with privacy issues, drinking, and exhaustion. He was involved in a bitter divorce/custody battle with his first wife, and his girlfriend Pamela Stephensen was pregnant. His divorce was granted in 1985 and he received custody of his two children. In the late '80s, Stephenson was working on Saturday Night Live in New York; Connolly periodically guested on the show and on David Letterman. He also did an HBO special with Whoopie Goldberg. In 1989, Connolly starred opposite Liam Neeson in The Big Man, married Stephenson, and replaced Howard Hesseman in the American sitcom Head of the Class. He proved successful and Warners signed a two-year contract with him. But the series was canceled and so Connolly was hired to portray the same character in a new sitcom, Billy, which was based on the film Green Card. He and his family decided to remain in the U.S.; shortly after settling in, the series was canceled. He made a cameo appearance in Indecent Proposal in 1992 and the following year returned to Glasgow to appear in Down Among the Big Boys. Since then he has become more involved with BBC television, notably in a fascinating tour of Scotland that resulted in his winning a Scottish BAFTA award. He also won a Best Arts Programme award for the BBC production The Bigger Picture and a Best Drama award for Down Among the Big Boys. Connolly continued his U.S. film career and even occasionally made guest appearances on U.S. television as he did in the short-lived 1996-1997 sitcom Pearl. Connolly received the best reviews for any of his dramatic work playing opposite Judi Dench in the engaging drama Mrs. Brown. He continued to balance a respected career as a stand-up comic with work in small films such as Beverly Hills Ninja, The Boondock Saints, Who Is Cletus Trout, and An Everlasting Piece. He scored a dramatic role in a big American film with his appearance in The Last Samurai opposite Tom Cruise, and was one of the many funny people who contributed to The Aristocrats. In 2006 Connolly kept the laughs coming opposite Jim Carrey in the highly stylized Brad Siberling comedy Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, and an appearance as a vile lord with lofty designs for the future in Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties. A vocal performance as a rogue squirrel in the computer animated adventure Open Season marked the first time Connolly had returned to the world of animation since the 1995 Disney musical Pocohontas. Connolly would continue to remain an active force in entertainment for years to come, appearing in movies like the comedy-horror Fido, and the fantasy adventure film Gulliver's Travels.

Trivia: A Windy City native, distinguished character actor Richard Riehle earned his undergraduate degree from Notre Dame and his master's from the University of Minnesota, then took his first cinematic bow with a bit part in 1975's Western Rooster Cogburn -- opposite John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn. After Rooster, Riehle abandoned screen work for over a decade to hit the East Coast and focus almost exclusively on Broadway and regional theater. Ed Zwick's acclaimed Civil War opus Glory (1989) marked Riehle's Hollywood comeback; he subsequently increased his screen time dramatically, and chalked up a resumé playing everymen -- usually heavyset and unpolished working stiffs such as policemen, detectives, judges, and bartenders -- in literally dozens of films. Riehle's credits include Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Mercury Rising (1998), Office Space (1999), Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo (1999), and National Lampoon's Dorm Daze 2 (2006). The actor is also known for his regular presence on two television series: the 1990 Ferris Bueller (as Principal Ed Rooney) and the 2001-2005 Grounded for Life (as Walt Finnerty). Riehle subsequently returned to National Lampoon work with the 2007 frat-boy comedy National Lampoon Presents The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell.

Trivia: A graduate of the University of Minnesota, baleful-eyed, prematurely gray Charles Cioffi made his first off-Broadway appearance in William Gibson's A Cry of Players. Cioffi continued as a familiar presence on the off-Broadway scene, finally making his on Broadway bow in 1990's Stand-Up Tragedy. In his film and TV work, Cioffi has most often been seen as an excitable police official or an uptight executive with something to hide (e.g., the sexually deviant "solid citizen" Peter Cable in Klute). His television work has encompassed a number of daytime soap operas, including Another World, Where the Heart Is, Ryan's Hope, and Days of Our Lives (as Ernest Toscano). Charles Cioffi has also been a regular in the prime-time weeklies Assignment: Vienna (1971), Get Christie Love! (1974), and the 1989 revival of Kojak.

Trivia: In films since at least 1963's The Scarlet Blade, British actor Michael Byrne has had roles ranging from the benign to the malevolent. He was equally at home with the Olde English trappings of Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1973) as he was with the up-to-date gangster ambience of The Long Good Friday (1982). Among his credits were Butley (1974), A Bridge too Far (1977) (halfway down the cast sheet as Lt. Col. Vandelur), The Medusa Touch (1978) and Force 10 from Navarone (1978). In 1989, Michael Byrne played Vogel, one of the multitudes of plot motivators in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Trivia: Character actress Shera Danese specialized in bit parts, initially ones of a slightly sultry nature. She landed one of her earliest big-screen roles as one of saxophone player Jimmy Doyle's (Robert De Niro) girlfriends in Martin Scorsese's revisionist musical New York, New York (1977), then drew attention away from Rebecca De Mornay as one of two prostitutes who accompany a high-school senior (Tom Cruise) out for a wild evening on the town, in Paul Brickman's satire on teen angst, Risky Business (1983). Subsequent projects included the 1987 Baby Boom (as a cloak room attendant), the 2002 John Q., and the 2006 Alpha Dog. Danese also appeared in numerous Columbo telemovies opposite longtime off-camera husband Peter Falk.

Trivia: Most of actor Stephen Elliot's film credits were piled up after he reached the age of fifty. The best of these include Hospital (1971), Death Wish (1974), The Hindenburg (1978) and Taking Care of Business (1988). Elliot was cast as Jill Eikenberry's bullying millionaire father in Arthur (1981), in which he pummeled prospective son-in-law Dudley Moore to a pulp when Moore balked at the altar; he repeated this ham-fisted characterization in Arthur 2, On the Rocks (1985). Stephen Elliot's acting contributions to television include patriarch Benjamin Lassiter on Beacon Hill (1975), Jane Wyman's ex-husband (not Ronald Reagan) on Falcon Crest (1981-82), and several years in the role of Paul Ailey on the daytime drama Love of Life.

Trivia: Mike Lally started in Hollywood as an assistant director in the early 1930s. Soon, however, Lally was steadily employed as a stunt man, doubling for such Warner Bros. stars as James Cagney and Pat O'Brien. He also played innumerable bit roles as reporters, court stenographers, cops and hangers-on. Active until 1982, Mike Lally was frequently seen in functionary roles on TV's Columbo.

Trivia: Character actor John Finnegan first appeared onscreen in the '70s.

Trivia: American actor Bruce Kirby made his Broadway bow at age 40 in the 1965 production Diamond Orchid. More stage work followed, and then movie assignments, commencing with the all-star Catch 22 (1970), and continuing into the 1980s with such productions as Sweet Dreams (1985) and Throw Momma from the Train (1987). Kirby's TV career has embraced both series successes (1989's Anything But Love, as Jamie Lee Curtis' father), ignoble failures (1976's Holmes and Yoyo, as Henry Sedford), and a few projects which never sold (Kirby was in two busted pilots for something called McNamara's Band). In 1984, Kirbyreturned to Broadway to understudy Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman in the revival of Death of a Salesman. Bruce Kirby, sometimes billed as Bruce Kirby Sr., was the father of actor Bruno Kirby, who formerly billed himself as B. Kirby Jr.

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: An American-born actor reared in Ireland and England, McGoohan made a memorable impression on the American and English viewing audiences by playing essentially the same role in three different television series. He began his performing career as a teen-ager, eventually played Henry V for the Old Vic company in London, and made mostly unremarkable films in the '50s. His movies include the delightful Disney film The Three Lives of Thomasina (1964). Success came in 1961, when McGoohan played government agent John Drake in Danger Man, a role he continued on Secret Agent (1965-66). He created, produced and often wrote episodes of the nightmarish, surrealistic cult series The Prisoner (1968-69). This show featured a character assumed to be the same John Drake (although he was known as Number 6 and his real name was never mentioned), who had been kidnapped and taken to a strange community. McGoohan later starred in the TV series Rafferty (1977) and directed the film Catch My Soul (1974). He won an Emmy Award in 1975 for his guest appearance on Columbo with Peter Falk.

Trivia: Actor George Hamilton got his start in high school dramatics. Movie-star handsome, Hamilton played the lead in his very first film, Crime and Punishment USA (1959). While his acting talent was barely discernible in his earliest effort, Hamilton steadily improved in such MGM films as Home From the Hill (1960), Where the Boys Are (1960), Light in the Piazza (1961). He was at his best in a brace of biopics: in Warner Bros.' Act One (1963) he played aspiring playwright Moss Hart, while in Your Cheatin' Heart (1965), he registered well as self-destructive C&W singer Hank Williams. His much-publicized mid-1960s dating of President Johnson's daughter Lynda Bird was unfairly written off by some as mere opportunism, a calculated ploy to buoy up a flagging career. In fact, it did more harm than good to Hamilton: by 1969, movie roles had dried up, and he was compelled to accept his first TV-series role, playing jet-setter Duncan Carlyle in The Survivors. The following year, he starred as State Department functionary Jack Brennan in the weekly TV espionager Paris 7000. He staged a spectacular comeback as star and executive producer of Love at First Bite (1979), a screamingly funny "Dracula" take-off that won the actor a Golden Globe nomination. Even better was Zorro the Gay Blade (1980), which unfortunately failed to match the excellent box-office performance of First Bite but which still provided a much-needed shot in the arm to Hamilton's career. He went on to play such campish roles as villainous movie producer Joel Abrigor in TV's Dynasty (1985-86 season only) and jaded 007-type Ian Stone in the weekly Spies (1987). Throughout the thick and thin of his acting career, Hamilton remained highly visible on the international social scene, squiring such high-profile lovelies as Elizabeth Taylor and Imelda Marcos. He also remained financially solvent with his line of skin products and tanning salons. In 1995, George Hamilton hopped on the talk-show bandwagon, co-starring with his former wife Alana (who'd remarried rocker Rod Stewart) on a not-bad syndicated daily TV chatfest.

Trivia: Publicity notwithstanding, Lesley Ann Warren did not exactly burst fully grown into the world in 1966 to star in the Rodgers and Hammerstein TV special Cinderella. Trained at New York's Professional Children's School, Lesley Ann studied under Lee Strasberg before making her Broadway debut in 110 in the Shade, the 1964 musical version of The Rainmaker. On the strength of Cinderella, Lesley Ann was signed to a Disney contract; but after starring in The Happiest Millionaire (1966) and The One and Only Genuine Original Family Band, she rebelled against her studio-imposed sweetness-'n'-light image. Upon replacing Barbara Bain in the long-running espionage TVer Mission: Impossible in 1970, Warren publicly emphasized that her character, Dana Lambert, was a "now" person, wise in the ways of sex. She stayed with Mission for only a year, after which she established herself as a leading light in the made-for-TV movie field, frequently cast as an older woman involved romantically with a much-younger man. She earned an Academy Award nomination for her hilarious performance as bleach-blond gangster's moll Norma in Victor/Victoria (1981), then starred in a couple of intriguing Alan Rudolph-directed dramas, Choose Me (1984) and The Songwriter (1986). Her more recent roles include Molly, the homeless woman in Mel Brooks' Life Stinks(1991), who goes into a "death throes" act whenever she feels like it, and the barracuda booking agent for c-and-w star George Strait in Pure Country (1994). For nearly a decade, Lesley Ann Warren was the wife of producer/hairstylist Jon Peters.