Trivia: Possessing an unusual beauty marked by perhaps the most distinctive set of lips in the business (an inheritance from father Steven Tyler), Liv Tyler unsurprisingly made her entrance into acting via the world of modeling. Since her breakthrough role in 1996's Stealing Beauty, she has emerged as a performer with bona fide talent, dropping her "model-actress" hyphenate in favor of just "actress."Born in New York, NY, on July 1, 1977, to model and former 1970s rock groupie Bebe Buell, Tyler spent most of her youth believing that rocker Todd Rundgren was her father. However, as she grew older, she began to notice more than a passing resemblance between herself and Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, who was a family friend, and she ultimately discovered that he was indeed her biological father. When she was 12, she took Tyler's last name as her own.After experiencing obligatory preteen awkwardness -- hers featured braces and a bit of a weight problem -- Tyler had blossomed enough by the time she was 14 to consider modeling. She moved to New York City in the company of her mother and began to pursue a career. After appearing on the covers of magazines like Seventeen and Mirabella, Tyler got her first taste of acting while filming a television commercial. She made her film debut in 1994, as the sister of an autistic boy in Bruce Beresford's Silent Fall, appearing in the mystery alongside Richard Dreyfuss and Linda Hamilton.Following this fairly auspicious debut, Tyler's next project, 1995's Empire Records, proved a disappointment on both commercial and critical levels. Tyler kept at it, next starring as the unrequited love interest of a reclusive pizza maker (Pruitt Taylor Vince) in James Mangold's Heavy that same year. Her work in the critically hailed film won her wide praise and her career began to take off. Tyler's breakthrough came the following year in Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. Starring as a 19-year-old who comes to Italy to find her father and lose her virginity, she suddenly became Hollywood's new "It" Girl, appearing on magazine covers and as one of People's "50 Most Beautiful" in 1997.After a lead as one of the titular Abbott sisters in Inventing the Abbotts (1997) and a brief cameo in U-Turn the same year, Tyler stepped into the realm of bloated budgets and even more bloated box-office returns with her role as Bruce Willis' daughter and Ben Affleck's girlfriend in Armageddon (1998). The following year, she returned to the art house circuit with Robert Altman's Cookie's Fortune. The film was widely praised, as was its ensemble cast, which included Tyler, Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Charles S. Dutton, Chris O'Donnell, and Ned Beatty. The same year, Tyler lent her talents to the 18th century road movie genre, starring opposite Robert Carlyle and Jonny Lee Miller in Plunkett and Macleane. She also had a leading role as the object of Ralph Fiennes' jaded affections in Martha Fiennes' Onegin, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival.After taking the role of an irresistibly destructive seductress in the 2001 comedy One Night at McCool's, Tyler took another trip back in time, this time putting her pixyish beauty to ideal use as Arwen, an elf faced with the daunting dilemma of choosing between love and immortality in director Peter Jackson's grandiose, three-film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolken's Lord of the Rings.She was the love interest for Ben Affleck in Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl. In 2007, she stretched her dramatic range in Mike Binder's Reign Over Me, and the next year played the love interest of Dr. Banner in The Incredible Hulk, and also took the lead in the home-invasion thriller The Strangers. She was the love interest for a frustrated wannabe superhero in James Gunn's Super in 2010, and the next year she had a major part in the thriller The Ledge. In 2014, she starred in the HBO series The Leftovers.

Trivia: As the object of Keri Russell's affections on the WB Network's TV series Felicity, Scott Speedman displays a laid-back charm that has helped him win over critics and viewers. More than a few fans of the show, upon first glimpsing the handsome actor, could understand why Felicity, in the storyline that formed the show's premise, would follow his character across the entire country.Born in London, England on September 1, 1975 to Scottish parents, Speedman was raised in Toronto. In high school, he began acting on a dare from a girlfriend. He appeared on Speaker's Corner, a Canadian version of an MTV show in which people paid money to air their views on television. Speedman caught the attention of one of the show's directors, who encouraged him to audition for the role of Robin in the upcoming Batman Forever (1995). Speedman did so and failed to get the part, but he did manage to get an agent in the process.Speedman acted in a number of Canadian television shows and spent a year at the University of Toronto, where he was an avid swimmer (he once aspired to swim for the Canadian team). After dropping out of the university, Speedman got his first film role in Kitchen Party, a Canadian film released in 1997. More lackluster work in television followed until Speedman, his career at a low, went to Manhattan to audition for the upcoming show Felicity. The show's creators were taken with his performance, and Speedman was soon living in Los Angeles, where the show was filmed. The positive attention that followed Felicity's debut made him and his co-stars the subjects of numerous interviews, articles, and websites, and gave Speedman the opportunities that he once could only dream of during his days of purgatory in Canadian television. Shortly after an appearance in the little seen 2000 comedy drama Duets, Speedman hit the big time when cast opposite Kurt Russell in the police detective thriler Dark Blue (2003). Though he did prove convincing in his role as a slightly naive LAPD homicide detective, the film quickly faded from sight at the box office and his commendable performance went largely unnoticed. His subsequent role in the romantic drama My Life Without Me once again showed his ability to carry a dramatic performance, but later that same year the up and coming actor nevertheless threw all dramatics out the window for a role as one of the sole humans in a neverending battle between vampires and werewolves. In the years to come, Smith would remain active on screen, appearing in films like The Moth Diaries and on the series Last Resort.

Trivia: Born in Japan and raised in Montgomery, AL, actor Glenn Howerton attended Juilliard before making his screen debut in the 2002 made-for-television feature Monday Night Mayhem. Recurring roles in That '80s Show and ER found Howerton settling into a comfortable small-screen schedule in 2002 and 2003, with supporting parts in such features as Serenity and Crank coming along just as Howerton joined the cast of the monumental FX comedy series It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In addition to his acting duties on the show, Howerton also served as writer, co-creator, and producer of the series. He would also take on regular roles on Unsupervised and lend his voice to The Cleveland Show.

Trivia: With distinctive, China doll-like features that gave her a thoroughly unique countenance, Australian model-cum-actress Gemma Ward carved out a niche for herself as one of the world's most unique and successful supermodels. A native of Perth (on Australia's western seaboard), Ward grew up in the obscurity of an average Aussie family, as the "tomboy" daughter of a physician and nurse, and only harbored dreams of movie stardom. At the age of 15, however, friends coaxed her into entering a local modeling competition (allegedly forging her mother's signature); though she didn't win the initial contest, an agent from Manhattan-based IMG spotted her, whisked her off to New York, and turned her into a global sensation on fashion runways and in magazine glossies. Ward's career imparted her with a multimillion-dollar fortune well before her 20th birthday and made her face an iconic one, so it was perhaps inevitable (and unsurprising) that she then made the leap from the catwalk into feature films. She took one of her first bows with a lead in the 2007 Aussie feature The Black Balloon (as the newfound girlfriend of a teenager who is struggling to care for his mentally ill brother). She then undertook a dramatic change of pace as one of three masked criminals who invade a home and terrorize a family in Bryan Bertino's thriller The Strangers.

Trivia: Actor Kip Weeks revealed a gift for playing genial American everymen, often with a jocky edge. He initially attained high-profile visibility for his evocation of Togo Railey -- one of the few Caucasian basketball players on a mostly black team at Texas Western University, circa 1962 -- in Jerry Bruckheimer's inspirational sports drama Glory Road (2006). Following that assignment, Weeks did an about-face and switched genres (dodging the threat of typecasting as well) with his portrayal of a masked burglar who systematically terrorizes a suburban couple in Bryan Bertino's tense psychological thriller The Strangers (2008).

Trivia: An actress who debuted as a performer in the early 2000s, Laura Margolis began her career with guest spots on television series including Friends, The Drew Carey Show, Family Law, and Monk. In 2007, she took on a small role on the soapy drama Dirty Sexy Money, playing Daisy, the extremely capable personal assistant of Darling family lawyer Nick George (Peter Krause). Margolis transitioned to features (and undercut her fresh-faced, seemingly innocent image in the process) with a performance in a slasher film -- not as a victim, as might be expected, but one of the aggressors, in Bryan Bertino's horror movie The Strangers (2008).