Trivia: Was employed by a major airline when she was cast on The Jeffersons; continued working for the airline during her first few seasons on the show. Is also a singer; released an album, It's Never Too Late, in 2006. Reunited with actress Regina King, who played her daughter on the 1980s sitcom 227, in a 2012 episode of Southland.

Trivia: Black supporting actor, former juvenile, onscreen from the '70s.

Trivia: On television, supporting actress Roxie Roker may best be remembered for playing outspoken Helen Willis for ten years on the popular television sitcom The Jeffersons. She and TV husband Franklin Cover comprised the first interracial married couple on network television. But in addition to television, Roker had also found success on stage and in the occasional feature film. Miami-born and Brooklyn-raised, Roker graduated from Howard University with a drama degree and then flew to England to study at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-on-Avon. During the 1960s, Roker supported herself with a secretarial job at NBC's New York office while trying to find acting jobs. Roker launched her drama career off-Broadway in productions such as Jean Genet's The Blacks. Between 1967 and '68, Roker hosted a local community television show, but that wasn't close enough to acting, so she quit to practice her craft full time. With the Negro Ensemble Company she appeared in Ododo and Rosalie Pritchet. In 1974, she earned an Obie and a Tony nomination for The River Niger. In 1975, shortly after moving to Los Angeles, Norman Lear cast Roker in The Jeffersons. In addition to this role, Roker occasionally guest-starred on other series and appeared in television movies. Her feature-film appearances were rare. Roker made her debut in Claudine (1974). In the '90s, Roker resumed her stage career, appearing in a theatrical version of The Jeffersons and then touring opposite Mary Martin and Carol Channing in Legends. Roker's son, Lenny Kravitz is a noted rock musician and record producer.

Trivia: Sherman Hemsley is best remembered for playing George Jefferson, the lovably pompous, diminutive loud-mouth who made a fortune from his dry cleaning business and moved from Queens to a posh Manhattan high rise in The Jeffersons, a popular sitcom that ran for ten years on the CBS network. Before becoming an actor in the late '60s, Hemsley worked for the U.S. Post Office. He started out on the New York stage where his first break came from playing Gitlow in the Broadway musical Purlie (1970). Television producer Norman Lear was impressed by Hemsley's performance and so created George Jefferson for him. Originally designed as an African-American alter ego/foil to his blustery, bigoted Archie Bunker character on the smash hit All in the Family, Hemsley's George became so popular that he and his family were given their own series in 1975. Following the series' demise, Hemsley played an egotistical, loud-mouthed deacon/lawyer at the First Community Church of Philadelphia who tried to keep the new minister, Reverend Gregory, from taking over what he viewed as his personal domain, on Amen. The series broke ground by being the first hit sitcom centered on religion and ran from 1986 to 1991. In between his series work, Hemsley occasionally played supporting roles in feature films after making his debut playing Rev. Mike in the comedy Love at First Bite (1979). Most of his subsequent films were low-budget affairs such as Stewardess School and Club Fed; he also continued to appear frequently on television as a guest star and starred in such failed series as Townsend Television (1993) and Goode Behavior (1996-1997), but never quite recaptured the success he had during the '70s and '80s. His final small-screen appearance came in 2006 when he was a cast member on the sixth season of the reality TV show The Surreal Life. Hemsley died at age 74 in late July, 2012.

Trivia: Defying her mother's wishes, African-American actress Isabel Sanford secretly worked as a nightclub performer in her teens. Upon winning 3rd prize in an Apollo Theatre amateur contest, Sanford could keep her new career a secret no longer. Married to a house painter who worked only on a seasonal basis, she held down a full-time job as a keypunch operator at the New York City department of Welfare, spending her evenings acting with such groups as Harlem Y and the American Negro Theatre. Seeking out better opportunities, Sanford packed her family into a bus and headed to Hollywood in the early 1960s. Her breakthrough film role was in Stanley Kramer's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner; she played Tillie the cook, who heartily disapproved of the upcoming interracial marriage between Katharine Houghton and Sidney Poitier (the hardest part of this assignment was not mouthing the "controversial" dialogue but preparing dinner in a key scene; Sanford had never learned to cook!) On the strength of this film, Isabel Sanford was hired for several guest spots on The Carol Burnett Show, which led to her most famous characterization: Louise Jefferson, the acerbic but loving wife of "movin' on up" Sherman Hemsley, on the immensely popular sitcom The Jeffersons (1975-82).

Trivia: Black supporting actor, occasional lead, onscreen from the late '70s.

Trivia: Although she officially launched her dramatic career on the big screen, with bit parts in Jonathan Demme's nostalgic period piece Swing Shift (1984) and Wes Craven's gore picture The Hills Have Eyes, Part II (1984), African-American actress Penny Johnson (also occasionally credited by her full married name, Penny Johnson Jerald) gained broadest recognition as a network mainstay on innumerable short-lived and long-running U.S. television series. Her presence on the glitter box quickly became so widespread, in fact, that devoted prime-time viewers who fail to connect with Johnson's name will invariably identify her countenance.Born March 14, 1961, in Baltimore, MD, Johnson recognized acting as her life's work while a teenager, and subsequently commenced dramatic training at her home city's Centre Stage Theatre, at age 13, by lying about her age to get in. (She claimed to be 14 -- the ensemble's minimum age requirement.) The ruse worked, and Johnson's success with that troupe encouraged her to subsequently perform in a traveling ensemble (as a mime, juggler, and fire eater) with the Baltimore-based Theatre Project, and attend university for dramatic training at Juilliard several years later. After the aforementioned film roles, Johnson segued into television, first with a brief ongoing role as Debbie on the daytime soap General Hospital (in 1986), then as university law student Vivian on the Showtime pay cable service's revival of the late '70s CBS series The Paper Chase, retitled The Paper Chase: The Second Year (a role she sustained from 1984-1986). After guest spots on such programs as The Jeffersons, Simon & Simon, and Tour of Duty, Johnson landed one of the leads on the very short-lived ABC sitcom Homeroom -- starring as Virginia "Vicki" Harper, the medical-student wife of adman-turned-fourth grade teacher Darryl Harper (Darryl Sivad). That program premiered on September 24, 1989, and wrapped not three months later, unable to find an audience.Johnson then re-teamed with Craven for the director's telemovie Night Visions (1990), about a tough L.A. cop (James Remar) who solicits the help of a psychic (Loryn Locklin) to root out a serial murderer. Craven and co. shot that effort as a pilot for a prospective series, but it never took off. In 1992, the actress returned to pay cable by joining the cast of The Larry Sanders Show, comedian Garry Shandling's HBO satire about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans at a late-night, Carson-style talk program. Johnson struck gold with that move; the show lasted until 1998 and became a massive runaway hit and a critical darling.After small turns in two A-list cinematic releases -- 1993's Tina Turner biopic What's Love Got to Do With It? (as Lorraine) and Rusty Cundieff's 1994 gangsta rap satire Fear of a Black Hat (as Re-Re) -- Johnson carved a permanent niche for herself on three number-one television series, sequentially Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, ER, and 24. In the first, she played Kasidy Yates, a stunningly gorgeous freighter captain who meets and falls in love with Benjamin Sisko, but is indefinitely abandoned by him when he moves into another dimension with The Prophets. She then donned a nurse's uniform for a season (1998-1999) as Lynette Evans at ER's Chicago County General Hospital, alongside co-stars George Clooney, Anthony Edwards, and others, and keyed up for her most prominent role: Sherry Palmer, the wife of Senator David Palmer, and essentially a shrewd, diabolical, Lady Macbeth-like character willing to break any and every moral precept to lock down the presidency of her husband. More recently, Johnson portrayed Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in the 2003 TV movie DC 9/11: Time of Crisis and again in another TV movie, The Path to 9/11, in 2006. Johnson married her husband, musician Gralin Jerald, in 1982. They have one daughter. In her off time, Johnson is actively involved with her church and with many progressive social causes; she played a significant role in securing aid for victims of Hurricane Katrina.