Trivia: Majored in psychology during her brief stint at the University of East London. Applied to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts at the behest of a former director, not expecting to actually get in. Played the starring role of Sister Mary Clarence in a United Kingdom run of Sister Act. Won a Daytime Emmy for her performance on a May, 2016 episode of NBC's The Today Show. Won the 2016 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance in the Broadway production The Color Purple, and a Grammy in 2017 for the cast album of the same production. Cowrote and sang "Fly Before You Fall" on the soundtrack for the film Beyond the Lights. Did a one-night show of the musical The Last Five Years, in 2017, the proceeds of which were donated to The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

Trivia: Made her Broadway debut in 2008 in the musical 13. Sang on three cast albums for her Nickelodeon show Victorious. Released her debut solo album, Yours Truly, in 2013, featuring the single "The Way." Became a vegan in 2013. Won an American Music Award in 2013 for New Artist of the Year. Opened for Justin Bieber on his 2013 Believe Tour.

Trivia: Best known in the West for her role as Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997) before her international breakout role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Michelle Yeoh is not your ordinary Bond girl. Her elegant good looks coupled with a killer high kick have made Yeoh one of the most popular martial arts stars in Asia and one of Hong Kong's most famous icons abroad.Born on August 6, 1962, in the mining town of Ipoh, in Western Malaysia, Yeoh's ethnically Chinese parents taught her Malay and English well before she learned Cantonese. She began ballet dancing at the age of four, and, inspired by Fame (1980), she enrolled in England's Royal Academy of Dance, where she eventually earned a B.A. Though a back injury ended her career as a ballerina, she returned to her home country to be crowned Miss Malaysia of 1983. From there, she appeared in a television commercial with Jackie Chan which caught the attention of a fledgling film production company called D&B Films. Taking the stage name Michelle Khan, she acted in bit parts in a number of forgettable films until her breakout role in the girls-with-guns action-comedy Yes, Madam! (1985) alongside noted kung-fu femme fatal Cynthia Rothrock. Though she did not know any martial arts before signing on to the film, Yeoh reportedly spent nine hours a day in the gym, working out and learning to take a punch. She had come a long way from the Royal Academy of Dance. Within the first five minutes of Madam, Yeoh emasculates a flasher and wastes a quartet of thieves. Yeoh immediately became one of Hong Kong's biggest female action stars and was soon appearing in films at a dizzying rate. Always performing her own stunts, she teamed up again with Rothrock in the kung-fu fest Royal Warriors (1986), and she starred in a violent Thomas Crown Afffair remake, Easy Money (1987). While making the Indiana Jones-style action epic Magnificent Warriors (1987), she got engaged to department store tycoon and studio head Dickson Poon (the D in D&B Films). Taking the lead of earlier martial arts divas such as Angela Mao, Yeoh retired from the movie biz in 1988 and retreated to a life of quiet domesticity. It didn't last long. The marriage was not a happy one (the Hong Kong press reported -- falsely it turns out -- that Poon suffered two broken ribs after a well-placed kick) and it ended in divorce in 1992.Yeoh's career came roaring back after her show-stopping performance in Police Story 3: Super Cop (1992), where she matched the notoriously fearless Jackie Chan stunt for jaw-dropping stunt. At the beginning of the shoot, Chan was skeptical as to whether women could fight, preferring them to look pretty and to sit on the sidelines. By the end of the film, Chan was legitimately concerned that he might be upstaged. Yeoh's hair-raising high-speed motorcycle jump onto a moving train (she learned how to drive the motorbike the day before the stunt) was bested only by Chan's death-defying leap from a minaret to an airborne rope ladder hanging from a helicopter hundreds of feet above Kuala Lumpur. The film was a massive success, making Yeoh the highest paid actress in Asia. Now being billed as Michelle Yeoh, she starred in a string of popular action flicks, including Heroic Trio (1992) opposite Maggie Cheung and Anita Mui, Tai Chi Master (1993) along with kung-fu phenom Jet Li, and Wing Chun (1994), which is without a doubt the rockin'-est sockin'-est flick ever about tofu. Her career of high-flying stunts resulted in many a dislocated shoulder and broken rib, but in 1995, while shooting Ann Hui's Ah Kam, Yeoh managed to seriously injure herself. She misjudged a jump off an 18-foot wall (an easy stunt according to her) and landed on her head, cracking a vertebra. Yeoh was put in traction, and it was feared that she would never walk again. Yet within a month, she was back on the set as if nothing happened.The American release of Supercop caught the eyes of Western producers, and soon she was cast opposite Pierce Brosnan in the James Bond-epic Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Once again, Yeoh's natural charisma, along with her effortless ability to dispatch bands of baddies, threatened to outclass the male lead. That same year, Yeoh was named one of People magazine's 50 sexiest people of the year. Back in Hong Kong, Yeoh received accolades not for her kung-fu abilities but for her acting skills in her role as Soong Ai-ling in the widely praised historical melodrama The Soong Sisters (1997).In 2000 Yeoh fused the popular historical aspects of her previous work with an unmistakably modern aesthetic, again displaying her unyielding skills and speed in the wildly popular Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Teaming with international superstar Chow Yun Fat in an epic and gravity-defying quest to recover a stolen Excaliber-like sword named the Green Destiny, Yeoh cemented her status as an incredibly graceful fighter with the unusual ability to display a remarkable dramatic range as well.

Trivia: Tall, gangly, and oddly handsome, stage, screen, and television actor Jeff Goldblum is an unlikely sex symbol. But for many women, especially those fond of eccentric intellectual types, he fits the role perfectly. Known for the range of quirky, often otherworldly characters he has portrayed, Goldblum is adept at playing lead and supporting roles in dramas and comedies alike. A native of Pittsburgh, PA, where he was born October 22, 1952, Goldblum moved to New York at the age of 17 to pursue an acting career. He got his start at Sanford Meisner's distinguished Neighborhood Playhouse, and in the '70s began performing in a wide variety of on and off-Broadway productions. When he was 22, Goldblum made his film debut with a small role as a rapist in Michael Winner's brutal revenge drama Death Wish (1974). He was performing on-stage in the El Grande de Coca Cola review when Robert Altman gave him a small part in California Split (1974) and a slightly larger role in Nashville (1975). Afterwards, Goldblum was steadily employed as a bit player in both major and minor features, turning in one of his most notable performances as a nervous houseguest struggling to remember his mantra in the Los Angeles-set segment of Annie Hall (1977). In 1980, Goldblum branched out into television, starring opposite Ben Vereen in the short-lived television detective comedy Tenspeed and Brown Shoe. As Brown Shoe, Goldblum played an uptight stockbroker trying to make it as a hardboiled private detective. Although the role may have given him greater recognition, the actor gained his first really favorable reviews playing a tabloid magazine reporter in The Big Chill (1983). This led to leading roles in such films as Into the Night (1985), where Goldblum played an aerospace engineer opposite Michelle Pfeiffer, and Silverado (also 1985), which cast him as a villainous gambler. In 1986, he had his first hit movie with David Cronenberg's terrifying sci-fi-horror film The Fly (1986), playing a driven scientist whose research turns him into a gruesome mutant. His co-star was his then-wife, Geena Davis, whom he met while they were on the set of the comedy-thriller Transylvania 6-5000 (1985). The couple divorced in the early '90s and Goldblum then embarked on a highly publicized relationship with actress Laura Dern that broke up in the mid-'90s.In 1989, Goldblum made a favorable transatlantic impression in the British romantic comedy The Tall Guy, playing a perpetually unemployed actor who is cast as the lead of a musical about the Elephant Man. He continued to work steadily throughout the subsequent decade, appearing in films of markedly varying quality. He found great success in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park, playing a mathematician in one of the decade's biggest blockbusters. In 1996, Goldblum again explored blockbuster territory with a leading role as a computer genius in Independence Day. He reprised his role from Jurassic Park in that film's sequel 1997 sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park. He starred opposite Eddie Murphy in the notorious bomb Holy Man.At the beginning of the next decade Goldblum worked primarily in independent films such as Burr Steers' debut Igby Goes Down, and playing the romantic and professional rival to Bill Murray in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. In 2006 he scored a role in his most mainstream film in quite sometime as part of the impressive ensemble in Barry Levinson's satire Man of the Year. In 2009, Goldblum joined the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent in the show's eighth season to play the role of Detective Zach Nichols. 2010 found the actor co-starring with Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton for the showbiz comedy Morning Glory. In 2014, he re-teamed with Anderson in The Grand Budapest Hotel. The following year, he appeared opposite Johnny Depp in Mortdecai and began filming his role in the long-awaited Indepdendence Day sequel, due in 2016.