Trivia: The daughter of legendary sex symbol Jayne Mansfield and former Mr. Universe Mickey Hargitay, Mariska Hargitay appears born to play the type of larger-than-life roles that would make her a Hollywood idol. Instead, from her breakthrough performance as a vulnerable single mother on ER to her starring turn as a somber detective on Law & Order: SVU, the talented actress has built her career by portraying real-life characters and keeping out of the spotlight. Raised in Los Angeles, Hargitay was a child of divorce before she celebrated her first birthday. In 1967, her mother died tragically when her car collided with a truck outside of New Orleans. Hargitay, then only three years old, was asleep in the backseat of the vehicle, but escaped uninjured. Days later, she moved in with her father and stepmother, Ellen Siano, a flight attendant. Hargitay participated in scores of activities throughout grade school, including cheerleading, student government, and athletics. She also developed a passion for performing: at 18, after being crowned 1982's Miss Beverly Hills, she enrolled in the University of California at Los Angeles' prestigious undergraduate theater program. Hartigay began her professional acting career while she was still a student with a bit part in Bob Fosse's Dorothy Stratten biopic Star 80 (1983). In 1985, she appeared in the B-movie Ghoulies and agreed to portray a teenage parolee inCBS' short-lived series Downtown. Roles in the teen comedies Welcome to 18 (1986) and Jocks (1987) quickly followed. In 1988, the actress joined her dad in the biopic of his own career, Mr. Universe. That same year, Hargitay earned the recurring role of Carly Fixx on television's Falcon Crest. The next several years found Hargitay acting in B-movies, such as a martial arts film called The Perfect Weapon (1991), and a handful of television films, such as Blind Side (1993) and Gambler V: Playing for Keeps (1994). She earned a small role in Mike Figgis's Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and replaced Gabrielle Fitzpatrick as Dulcea in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie (1995), but her scenes were eventually re-shot with Fitzpatrick in the role. Throughout the late '80s and early '90s, Hargitay also appeared in numerous popular television shows -- In the Heat of the Night, Baywatch, Wiseguy, thirtysomething, Booker, Seinfeld, Ellen, The Single Guy -- and in quite a few failed series -- Tequila and Bonetti, Key West, Can't Hurry Love, Prince Street, and Cracker. In subsequent years, producer Dick Wolf tapped the actress for his Law & Order spin-off, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999). As NYPD Detective Olivia Benson, Hargitay became a familiar and a celebrated face: She earned several award nominations for her performance on the show, as she stuck with the popular show for over ten years.In addition to working in film and television, Hargitay found time for the theater -- appearing on the Los Angeles stage in Salad Days, Women's Work, and Porno -- and read Rochelle Majer Krich's crime story Regrets Only on a mystery-themed audiobook. She also established her own charity, Spirit of the Dolphin, which gives abused children the chance to swim with dolphins in Hawaii. In 2007, Hargitay served as the National Ambassador for Lee National Denim Day to raise money and awareness for breast cancer. In terms of off-camera activity, Hargitay's successful pregnancy at the age of 42 (with her husband, SVU co-star Peter Hermann) made headlines as well.

Trivia: Is the son of Cuban immigrants. In his youth, aspired to become a baseball player or a lawyer, or join the Coast Guard. Was a lifeguard in Miami as a teen. Met his future wife, Lilly, during a middle-school theater class when they were just 13. They continued their education together through junior high, high school, college and graduate school. Off-camera pursuits include writing; received writing credits on the Cold Case episodes "Stealing Home" (2009) and "Metamorphosis" (2010).

Trivia: Began acting in community theater productions at age 6. Played on her high-school softball team. Appeared in the short-lived Broadway-bound play Bobbi Boland opposite Farrah Fawcett after arriving in New York in 2002. Costarred in the Web sitcom The Burg. Made television debut on the ABC soap opera All My Children in 2005. Filmed Past Life in Atlanta, Georgia, located about 45 minutes from her hometown of Cumming. Spent a week with real U.S. Marshals to prepare for her starring role in NBC's Chase.

Trivia: Launching his career as a standup comic, American performer Richard Belzer entered the 1970s as a member of an odd New York-based comedy troupe called Channel One. Anticipating the home video explosion by over a decade, Channel One staged satirical, scatological routines lampooning the banalities of television -- and staged them in front of TV cameras, which transmitted the routines to little TV monitors, which in turn were watched by the live audience. Some of the best sketches were assembled into an X-rated comedy feature, The Groove Tube (1970), which featured Belzer, Ken Shapiro, and a brash newcomer named Chevy Chase. For the next decade, Belzer played the comedy-club circuit, popped up as a talkshow guest, and appeared in occasional films like Fame (1982). He joined still another comedy troupe in 1983, which appeared nightly on the syndicated interview program Thicke of the Night. The host was Allan Thicke, and Belzer's comic cohorts included such incipient stars as Charles Fleischer, Chloe Webb and Gilbert Gottfried. Thicke of the Night was one of the more notorious bombs of the 1983-84 season, but it enabled Belzer to secure better guest-star bookings, and ultimately a hosting job on his own program, debuting in 1986 over the Lifetime Cable Service. It was on this series that wrestler Hulk Hogan, demonstrating a stranglehold on Belzer caused the host to lose consciousness -- which prompted a highly publicized lawsuit instigated by Belzer against the Hulkster. In the early 1990s, Richard Belzer could be seen as a non-comic regular on the TV series Homicide. His Homicide character, John Munch, would become one of the longest-running fictional creations on TV appearing in more than a half-dozen other television shows, most notably Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.

Trivia: Often cited as the founding father of gangsta rap, Ice-T has also crafted a successful film career from his hardened street persona. Despite the fact that his early roles stuck closely to his public image as a thuggish West Coast pimp, T has since proved both his versatility and his sense of humor by appearing as everything from a mutant kangaroo (Tank Girl [1995]) to, in a surprisingly effective about-face, a police officer (New Jack City [1991]). Born Tracy Marrow in Newark, NJ, in 1958 and later adapting his better-known persona as a tribute to pimp-turned-author Iceberg Slim, T was sent at age 12 to live in Califorina with an aunt after his father died of a heart attack (his mother had died four year earlier, also of a heart attack). Ice-T soon began to develop an obsession with rap music, and after serving a two-year stint in the Army, he began recording and appeared in the films Breakin' and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (both 1984). Following a near death auto accident in 1986, T devoted his life to music and released his debut album, Rhyme Pays, the following year. T gained positive accolades for his first major film role in 1991's New Jack City, in which he played a dedicated police officer, and the irony was not lost on fans the following year when he caused a stir with a song entitled "Cop Killer." After sticking close to the streets in Ricochet (1991), Trespass (1992), and Surviving the Game (1994), T took a sci-fi detour with Tank Girl and Johnny Mnemonic (both 1995). Generally appearing in straight-to-video schlock from the mid-'90s on, Ice-T could be seen as a naval pilot in Stealth Fighter (1999) and stealing a magic flute from a vengeful green meanie in Leprechaun in the Hood (2000). Though his appearances in such films grew nearly too frequent to count, T occasionally appeared in such theatrical releases as 3000 Miles to Graceland and Abel Ferrara's 'R Xmas (both 2001). After offering curious insight into the life of a pimp in the documentary Pimps Up, Ho's Down, T continued to expound on the life of a hustler in Pimpin' 101 (2003). He also took on a recurring role on the Law & Order spin-off Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and later joined the cast as a regular in the show's second season, soon becoming a popular fixture on prime time TV. T would also enjoy success on the reality circuit, starring in the candid reality show Ice Loves Coco with his wife, Nicole "Coco" Austin.

Trivia: Dann Florek was a working actor for 15 years, on stage, in movies, and on television before he became a television star on Law and Order. Born in Flat Rock, MI (near Detroit) in 1950, he was a physics major at Eastern Michigan University until he discovered his affinity for acting and theater. He moved to New York in the early 1970s and became a member of The Acting Company at The Juilliard School. Florek's New York theater credits included work in productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, and Death of a Salesman. He later performed in many productions staged at the La Jolla Playhouse and the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. Florek's film credits include Sweet Liberty, Hard Rain, Angel Heart, and The Flintstones, and he has made appearances on NYPD Blue, Wings, The Pretender, and The Practice. Additionally, he played Abraham Lincoln in the short-lived Fox Network series The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer. It was as Dave Meyer on L.A. Law that Florek first came to the attention of television viewers, but it was his four seasons on Law and Order that made him a star. He became a familiar and popular actor as Lieutenant (and later Captain) Donald Cragen, the head of the detective squad on whose investigations the series focuses from week to week. Florek also directed several episodes of the series after leaving the cast of the show in 1993, and is an active member of the Directors Guild of America. In 1999, he joined the cast of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, reprising and greatly expanding his role of Captain Cragen, now head of a detective unit specifically assigned to the investigation of sex crimes. Equally skilled at comedy and drama (although more familiar for his work in the latter), Florek is one of a new generation of triple-threat actor/directors to emerge from television in the 1980s and 1990s. Florek continued to work on Law & Order until 2010.

Trivia: Actress Patricia Arquette is the granddaughter of Cliff Arquette, the daughter of character actor Lewis Arquette, and the sister of actors Rosanna Arquette, David Arquette and Alexis Arquette. Inaugurating her own film career in the mid-'80s, the actress came into her own with a gallery of fine portrayals in the '90s. In 1993 alone, she was seen as the hero's cousin/inamorata in Ethan Frome; the strung-out heroine in the stylishly violent road movie True Romance; and the hero's lesbian sister in Inside Monkey Zetterland. Arquette closed out 1994 on a fine note with her sympathetic portrayal of Kathy O'Hara, the second wife of Hollywood's "world's worst director," in Tim Burton's Ed Wood. The following year included a starring role in John Boorman's Beyond Rangoon and a marriage to actor Nicolas Cage. In 1996, Arquette had lead roles in a number of films, most notably David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster, in which she played Ben Stiller's put-upon wife. She then switched gears with starring roles in David Lynch's Lost Highway and the thriller Nightwatch. She tried her hand at a Western in 1998, playing the object of Woody Harrelson's and Billy Crudup's desires in Stephen Frears' The Hi-Lo Country. Despite an interesting premise and excellent cast, the film flopped, but Arquette continued to work steadily the following year, with lead roles in the black comedy Goodbye Lover; Stigmata, in which she starred opposite Gabriel Byrne as the unwitting target of a supernatural phenomenon; and Martin Scorsese's Bringing out the Dead, a film starring Arquette's then-husband Cage as a burnt-out paramedic.Following the weightiness of the creepy Stigmata and the disturbing Bringing Out the Dead, Arquette took things in a decidedly lighter direction with her next two projects. In 2000, she played Adam Sandler's love-interest in the comedy Little Nicky, while the following year found her opposite Tim Robbins in the off-the-wall Human Nature. Written by Being John Malkovich scribe Charlie Kaufman, Human Nature was the feature debut from acclaimed music-video director Michel Gondry and featured Arquette as a woman cursed with a coat of fur covering her body.As the decade progressed, audiences could see Arquette in projects ranging from the star-studded documentary Searching for Debra Winger to the sleeper family film Holes. Then in 2005, Arquette found a truly resonant role, starring the psychic Allison Dubois on the extremely popular supernatural drama Medium. The show would run from 2005 to 2011, and Arquette would follow it up with a role alongside Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman in A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III.In 2014, Arquette enjoyed the biggest critical success of her career playing the mother in Richard Linklater's universally praised Boyhood. Shot over the course of 12 years, the movie scored Arquette numerous year-end accolades, including an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Trivia: Though Jason Gedrick is primarily a supporting actor, his first role was relatively impressive for a newbie; in 1983, he appeared as an extra in the cast of Bad Boys with Sean Penn, who encouraged Gedrick, then a Chicago high-school student, to further pursue acting. Penn's advice paid off fairly quickly, considering that by 1985, Gedrick had landed leading roles in Iron Eagle, The Zoo Gang, and The Heavenly Kid. In 1988, Gedrick starred as a washed-out basketball player-turned-police officer opposite Meg Ryan and Kiefer Sutherland in Promised Land, and went on to play small roles in Born on the Fourth of July and Backdraft. Between film roles, Gedrick kept busy with stage work, starring with Helen Hunt and Don Ameche in a Broadway production of Our Town, as well as an off-Broadway production of Mrs. Dally Has a Lover with Judith Ivey. Though Gedrick was less successful on the big screen during the mid-'90s, the actor was praised for his television work. In 1996 and 1997, Gedrick starred as a murder defendant in Steven Bochco's Murder One, and later starred opposite Ken Olin and Joe Pantoliano in CBS's critically acclaimed series EZ Streets. Gedrick was also recognized for his work with Danny Aiello and Joe Mantegna in The Last Don and The Last Don II, both six-hour CBS miniseries. Gedrick enjoyed similar success for his lead role in the CBS drama Falcone, which was based on the feature film Donnie Brasco, and would go on to land a lead role alongside Billy Baldwin and Chazz Palminteri in One Eyded King (2002). Gedrick could also be seen in NBC's Boomtown (2002) and the made-for-cable drama A Date With Darkness: The Trial and Capture of Andrew Luster.In 2006 he joined the cast of NBC's television series Windfall, which co-starred his former Boomtown alumni Lana Parilla. Though Windfall was short-lived, he would return to television for the A&E original movie Kings of South Beach (2007), in which he worked alongside Donnie Wahlberg. Gedrick appeared on seasons 3 and 4 of Desperate Housewives to play the love interest du jour, and joined the cast of HBO's drama Luck in 2012.

Trivia: Anne Meara started out and ended up a distinguished dramatic actress--and in between, scored high marks as a comedienne, playwright and screenwriter. Launching her career in summer stock in 1950, Meara won an Obie Award for her intensely dramatic performance in the 1955 off-Broadway production Maedchen in Uniform; during this period, she was also a semi-regular on the NBC TV daytime soaper The Greatest Gift. Auditioning for an opera in 1954, she met another struggling actor, Jerry Stiller; they were married the following year. Forming the comedy team of Stiller & Meara, The team skyrocketed to stardom via their many appearances on such 1960s variety series as The Ed Sullivan Show and The Steve Allen Show. One of their richest sources of material was the difference in their ethnic backgrounds, especially in their famous "Hershey Horowitz/Mary Elizabeth Doyle" routines (an Irish Catholic, Meara converted to Judaism upon her marriage to Stiller). They also appeared together on Broadway, in the supporting cast of the 1971 sitcom The Paul Lynde Show, and in an obscure 1975 syndicated TV comedy "filler" series Take Five With Stiller and Meara. On her own, Meara has provided comic and noncomic support to several films, including Lovers and Other Strangers (1970), The Out-of-Towners (1970) and Fame (1980). She starred in the 1975 TV lawyer series Kate McShane, and co-starred as tavern owner Mae on The Corner Bar (1973), divorced airline stewardess Sally Gallagher on the 1976-77 season of Rhoda, acid-tongued cook Veronica Rooney on Archie Bunker's Place (1979-83), and mother-in-law Dorothy Halligan on Alf (1987). In 1983, Meara won the Writers Guild "outstanding achievement" award for her script for the made-for-TV feature Another Woman, and ten years later was nominated for a Tony Award for her portrayal of Marthy in the Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. Anne Meara is the mother of comic actor Ben Stiller and worked with her son in his directorial feature debut, Reality Bites (1994), Zoolander (2001) and Night at the Museum (2006). She recurred on Sex and the City, playing Miranda's mother-in-law, Mary, and later reprised the role in the feature film. Meara died in 2015, at age 85.

Trivia: Is of Nigerian descent.Has run the New York Marathon twice in support of the Palm out Poverty initiative. Practiced wrestling at a young age and earned a scholarship to attend college.Studied abroad in Mexico while he was in college.Has written articles for the New York Times.In 2012, he founded Liberated People, a lifetime brand company that has contributed to many causes to inspire people to act.Founded his own furniture business, Enitan Vintage.Speaks fluent Spanish.

Trivia: Is of Cuban heritage. Made his Broadway debut in the 2000 revival of Rocky Horror Picture Show, playing Riff Raff. Took over the role of Master of Ceremonies in the Broadway production of Cabaret in 2001; played opposite both Gina Gershon and Molly Ringwald as Sally Bowles. Famously called out castmate Jeremy Piven for his unprofessional antics during a live performance of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow in 2008. With his 2009 Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow, he became only the second performer to be nominated in all four Tony acting categories. Has narrated a number of audio books, including The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer.

Trivia: She might not be a household name, but the statuesque character actress Tamara Tunie sports a resumé as distinctive as she is innately glamorous. Tunie landed her first major role as litigator Jessica Griffin McKechnie Harris on the soap opera As the World Turns in 1986 -- a part she played for 11 years. In the mean time, Tunie signed for a small role in the endearing yet sadly overlooked coming-of-age dramedy Sweet Lorraine (1987), an unsung predecessor to the box-office blockbuster Dirty Dancing, starring Maureen Stapleton and Trini Alvarado. Tunie signed for a bit part in the 1989 period murder mystery Bloodhounds of Broadway, but despite the fact that it claimed a pedigree as impressive as Lorraine (with Matt Dillon, Madonna, Jennifer Grey, and others), the movie unfortunately failed to deliver on its noble intentions. Over the course of the next several years, Tunie turned up several times on Steven Bochco's NYPD Blue, and landed the bit part of Leslie Christos in the Al Pacino big-city crime drama City Hall (1996), directed by Harold Becker (Taps). She re-teamed with Pacino for the darkly comic supernatural horror film The Devil's Advocate (1997), then worked with Brian De Palma and Nicolas Cage on the 1998 thriller Snake Eyes. Tunie's most high-profile work, however, was yet to come. In 2002, she delivered a compelling performance as Alberta Green in the first season of the series thriller 24. In 1999, the actress resumed her portrayal of Jessica Harris on As the World Turns and continued to sporatically return to the role through the 2000s. Beginning in 2000, Tunie also portrayed Melinda Warner on the popular series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.