Trivia: American actress Candice Bergen was a celebrity even before she was born. As the first child of popular radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his young wife Frances, Candice was a hot news item months before her birth, and headline material upon that blessed event (her coming into the world even prompted magazine cartoons which suggested that Edgar would try to confound the nurses by "giving" his new daughter a voice). Candice made her first public appearance as an infant, featured with her parents in a magazine advertisement. Before she was ten, Candice was appearing sporadically on dad's radio program, demonstrating a precocious ability to throw her own voice (a skill she hasn't been called upon to repeat in recent years); at 11 she and Groucho Marx's daughter Melinda were guest contestants on Groucho's TV quiz show You Bet Your Life. Candice loved her parents and luxuriated in her posh lifestyle, though she was set apart from other children in that her "brothers" were the wooden dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd - and Charlie had a bigger bedroom than she did! Like most 1960s teens, however, she rebelled against the conservatism of her parents and adopted a well-publicized, freewheeling lifestyle - and a movie career. In her first film, The Group (1965), Candice played a wealthy young lesbian - a character light years away from the sensibilities of her old-guard father. She next appeared with Steve McQueen in the big budget The Sand Pebbles (1966), simultaneously running smack dab into the unkind cuts of critics, who made the expected (given her parentage) comments concerning her "wooden" performance. Truth to tell, Candice did look far better than she acted, and this status quo remained throughout most of her film appearances of the late 1960s; even Candice admitted she wasn't much of an actress, though she allowed (in another moment that must have given papa Edgar pause) that she was terrific when required in a film to simulate an orgasm. Several films later, Candice decided to take her career more seriously than did her critics, and began emerging into a talented and reliable actress in such films as Carnal Knowledge (1971) and The Wind and the Lion (1975). Most observers agree that Candice's true turnaround was her touching but hilarious performance as a divorced woman pursuing a singing career - with little in the way of talent - in the Burt Reynolds comedy Starting Over (1979). Candice's roller-coaster offscreen life settled into relative normality when she married French film director Louis Malle; meanwhile, her acting career gained momentum as she sought out and received ever-improving movie and TV roles. In 1988, Candice began a run in the title role of the television sitcom Murphy Brown, in which she was brilliant as a mercurial, high-strung TV newsmagazine reporter, a role that won Ms. Bergen several Emmy Awards. While Murphy Brown capped Candice Bergen's full acceptance by audiences and critics as an actress of stature, it also restored her to "headline" status in 1992 - when, in direct response to the fictional Murphy Brown's decision to become a single mother, Vice President Dan Quayle delivered his notorious "family values" speech.Murphy Brown finished its successful run in 1997, and Bergen would make a handful of big-screen appearances in the ensuing years including Miss Congeniality, Sweet Home Alabama, and The In-Laws. In 2004 she became part of the cast of Boston Legal, another hit show that ran for five often award-winning seasons. When that show came to a close, she appeared in films such as The Women, Sex and the City, and Bride Wars - where she portrayed the country's leading wedding planner.

Trivia: A burly, but handsome, supporting player whose gruff exterior lent itself to tough characters with an underlying sentimentality, actor Robert Pastorelli overcame personal hardships to become a prominent fixture in both films and television. A New Jersey native and former boxer, his most challenging bout was a harrowing struggle with drug addiction. He later pursued a career in the New York theater, and initial stage roles in Rebel Without a Cause and Death of a Salesman led to an interest in films. He headed for Hollywood in 1982, and was a natural as rough-and-tumble characters on such popular TV shows as Cagney and Lacey, Hill Street Blues, and Newhart. In 1984, he made his movie debut with a small role in the made-for-TV feature I Married a Centerfold. Roles in Outrageous Fortune and Beverly Hills Cop II (both 1987) followed, and, in 1988, Pastorelli began a seven-year stint as Candice Bergen's housepainter on the popular sitcom Murphy Brown (for which he would earn an Emmy nomination). Two years later, he was cast in his most substantial big-screen role to date when he appeared as Kevin Costner's disheveled traveling companion in the epic Western Dances With Wolves, a performance which got Pastorelli more screen work in the '90s, including roles in such releases as Sister Act 2 (1993), Eraser (1996), and Michael (1996). In 1997 Pastorelli essayed a rare lead by taking the lead in the shortlived stateside adaptation of the popular UK mystery series Cracker. In later years, Pastorelli was increasingly active on the small screen with roles in such made-for-TV features as The Ballad of Lucy Whipple (2001), South Pacific (2001), and Women vs. Men (2002). He made a return to feature territory in 2004 with a supporting role in the eagerly anticipated Get Shorty sequel, Be Cool. Though Pastorelli's career had been experiencing a bit of a surge thanks to such projects as Be Cool, fans were dismayed when the actor was found dead in his Hollywood Hills home of a suspected drug overdose.

Trivia: Brenda Strong's offscreen name might not immediately register with Seinfeld fans, but they will immediately identify the character actress after learning that she played the grating Sue Ellen Mischke, one of Elaine Benes's thorn-in-the-flesh nemeses, on that seminal American sitcom. Actually, Strong's television-heavy resumé reads like a best-of prime-time series list -- including not only Seinfeld, but Ally McBeal, Nip/Tuck, Gilmore Girls, 7th Heaven, and others. Strong remains best known, however, for her pivotal contribution to Desperate Housewives as the ill-fated Mary Alice Young, a social-climbing hausfrau who commits suicide in the opening episode of the program, and then hangs around (in a regular voice-over) to offer acerbic observations from the afterlife about her backstabbing earthbound friends. Once Desperate Housewives ended in 2012, Strong joined the continuation of the series Dallas, playing Ann Ewing, Bobby's wife.In addition to her television work, Strong also landed bit parts in such features as Spaceballs (1987), The Craft (1996), and Starship Troopers 2 (2004). In 2009 she appeared in Melora Hardin movie You. Strong hosted a series of exercise videos in the early 2000s as well, among them Yoga 4 Fertility (2001) and Yoga 4 Partners (2002).

Trivia: An esteemed African-American playwright and actor whose roles almost invariably contend with the politics and dynamics of race (frequent collaborator Spike Lee once famously described him as a "racial cheerleader"), thespian Roger Guenveur Smith grew up in Berkeley and debuted onscreen in the late '80s. Over the ensuing years, Smith cultivated and sustained a reputation for tackling demanding, challenging, and thought-provoking assignments with immense aplomb. He achieved much of his success thanks to repeated collaborations with Lee, who cast him as Yoda in the musical School Daze (1988) and Smiley, the hipster street philosopher in Do the Right Thing (1989); in fact, Lee later noted that Smith was the one who devised the idea for the juxtaposed photographs of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in one of Thing's pivotal scenes. Meanwhile, Smith remained extremely active in regional theater, both by authoring his own efforts (such as a musical about Christopher Columbus that painted commonly accepted versions of the man's life story as historical revisionism) and by teaching drama to juvenile delinquents. As the years passed, Smith's onscreen activity crescendoed; he signed for plum roles in such contemporary classics as King of New York (1990), Deep Cover (1992), and Eve's Bayou (1997), and, significantly, extended his professional relationship with Lee to many additional projects. The celebrated director cast Smith in such features as Malcolm X (1992), Get on the Bus (1996), He Got Game (1998), and Summer of Sam (1999), all of which received considerable acclaim. Their actor-director working relationship culminated in the little-seen (but arguably brilliant) A Huey P. Newton Story (2001) -- a Lee-directed film of Smith's one-man stage show on the life of controversial Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton. The film preserves the original Smith-authored play, and stars the thespian as Newton; Lee augments the film with visual pyrotechnics and interpolates archival footage to give the feature depth and dimension. Unfortunately, the project failed to receive even a limited theatrical release, and premiered instead on the Black Starz cable network. Thereafter, Smith continued his theatrical work (albeit very infrequently) with such plays as the 2003 Iceland, a psychological drama about four unrelated characters that debuted in Philadelphia. He also continued his frequent film roles, with assignments including Shade (2003), God's Waiting List (2006), Confessions of a Call Girl (2006), and Ridley Scott's American Gangster (2007).