Trivia: Born December 6th, 1948,, JoBeth Williams launched her acting career on the East Coast repertory theater circuit. Williams made her Broadway bow in 1980's A Coupla White Chicks Sitting Around Talking and gained a TV following as a regular on the daytime serials The Guiding Light and Somerset. She made an impressible film debut in a "flash part" in the Oscar-winning Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). Williams' star ascended with such roles as the mother of long-suffering Heather O'Rourke in the first two Poltergeist films and the sixties activist-cum-housewife in The Big Chill (1983). While she hasn't always been well-served by Hollywood, she has managed to show up in a number of worthwhile assignments, ranging from 1984's Teachers (in which she spontaneously performing the most dramatically justifiable striptease in movie history) to 1994's Wyatt Earp (as Bessie Earp) Her TV-movie credits are even more impressive: she had several memorable moments in the post-apocalyptic The Day After (1983) and was brilliant as the anguished mother of the murdered title character in Adam (1983). She has also participated in series television, lending her voice to the character of Angel in the animated nighttimer Fish Police (1992) and essaying the Susan Sarandon role in the 1995 weekly TV adaptation of The Client. In addition, she served as executive producer of the 1991 TV movie Bump in the Night, and as co-producer of the Oscar-nominated documentary On Hope (1994). JoBeth Williams is married to director John Pasquin. In 2005 the actress worked with Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler for the baseball comedy Fever Pitch, and appeared in four episodes of Showtime's hit series Dexter in 2007. In 2011, Smart worked with Steve Martin, Owen Wilson, and Jack Black in the comedy The Big Year.

Trivia: Solidly built American actor Craig T. Nelson started out as a comedy writer and performer, doing radio and nightspot gigs in the Los Angeles area. Success was not immediately forthcoming, and Nelson took a four-year sabbatical from show business, moving with his family to a remote cabin in Northern California. In 1979, he made his first film, ...And Justice For All, written by his onetime partner Barry Levinson. While subsequent roles in Poltergeist and Silkwood followed, Nelson would find true stardom on television. For eight seasons beginning in 1989, he starred as college athletics instuctor Hayden Fox on the top-ranked ABC sitcom Coach. Appearing alongside supporting players Jerry Van Dyke and Shelly Fabares, Nelson received an Emmy for his work on the show in 1992.After Coach, Nelson showed up in a few small roles in feature films and television mini-series before returning to series work in 2000, leading the cast of CBS's D.C.-based cop-drama The District. While enjoying the success of that show, Nelson found time for his first high-profile feature film role in over a decade, providing the voice of the head of a family of superheroes in the 2004 Disney/Pixar animated film The Incredibles. In 2005 he played the patriarch of the dysfunctional clan in The Family Stone, and followed that up two years later as skating coach in the comedy Blades of Glory. He was Ryan Reynolds disapproving dad in the hit comedy The Proposal in 2009. He was cast as the head of the Braverman clan in NBC's relaunch of Parenthood in 2010, and appeared in the inspirational Soul Surfer in 2011.

Trivia: While eating lunch with her mother in the MGM commissary, five-year-old Heather O'Rourke was spotted by filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Within months, little Heather was cast in the Spielberg-produced scare piece Poltergeist, playing the little girl who becomes the conduit for the film's TV-dwelling spectres. Before she was seven, Heather had entered the collective pop-culture consciousness of America with her Poltergeist catchphrases "They're here!" and "They're baa-aack!" In the fall of 1982, Heather joined the cast of TV's Happy Days as regular Linda Purl's daughter; she went on to appear in several guest-star spots, as well as the two Poltergeist sequels. On the first day of February of 1988, Heather O'Rourke was rushed to the Children's Hospital of San Diego, complaining of chest pains (later revealed to be the result of septic shock); while undergoing surgery, the 12-year-old actress died of heart failure.

Trivia: Standing 4'3", and possessed of a nails-on-the-blackboard speaking voice, actress Zelda Rubinstein specialized in eccentric characterizations. She was appropriately cast as one of the Little People in her first film, Under the Rainbow (1981). Her best-remembered screen role was Tangina, the disastrously self-assured exorcist in the first two Poltergeist films. Zelda's declaration that "This house is clean" has to be the most famous speaking-too-soon miscalculations in movie history. She was later seen in oddball minor roles as domineering mamas, witches, snoops and gamblers. TV fans know Zelda Rubinstein best as Ginny Weedon on the weekly cult favorite Picket Fences (1992-95). In January of 2010, after a long run-in with health issues, Rubinstein passed away at a respiratory hospital in Los Angeles.

Trivia: A full-blooded Muscogee-Creek Indian, Will Sampson spent most of his adult life as a successful artist. The towering Sampson was spotted at an art show by an assistant to actor/producer Michael Douglas; Douglas then cast Sampson in the important role of enigmatic sanitarium inmate Chief Bromden in the 1976 Oscar-winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It was the beginning of a ten-year acting career that would embrace both films (Buffalo Bill and the Indians, The Outlaw Josey Wales) and television. In the latter medium, Will Sampson had a recurring role on the Robert Urich private eye series Vegas (1978-1981), and starred as a taciturn Native American police officer in the 1977 TV pilot film Relentless.

Trivia: The daughter of a Dublin attorney, Geraldine Fitzgerald was still in her teens when she made her theatrical bow with the Gate Theatre. In films from 1934, she played a series of petulant ingénues in a string of forgettable quota quickies; in later years, she sarcastically summed up her early screen roles by repeating her most frequent snatch of dialogue, "But daddy, it's my birthday!" With her first husband, she moved to New York in 1938, where she was hired by her old Gate Theatre colleague Orson Welles to star in the Mercury Theater production Heartbreak House. This led to several choice Hollywood assignments in such films as Dark Victory (1939) and Wuthering Heights (1939). Forever battling with studio executives over her often inconsequential screen assignments (exceptions included such roles as Edith Galt in the 1945 biopic Wilson), Fitzgerald briefly gave up films in 1948 to return to the stage. Carefully picking and choosing her subsequent movie roles, she established herself as a reliable character actress in quality films like Ten North Frederick (1958) and The Pawnbroker (1965). She briefly pursued a folksinging career before returning to Broadway in the ultra-demanding role of Mary Tyrone in the 1971 revival of Long Day's Journey Into Night. Active into the late '80s, Fitzgerald has added a welcome dash of Hibernian feistiness to such projects as Arthur (1981) and Easy Money (1983). Geraldine Fitzgerald is the mother of prominent British film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg.