Trivia: A graduate of the University of Dubuque, Tony Danza was busy with a profitable if not spectacular career as a boxer when he began tentatively moving into acting. His first important TV role was, appropriately, as erstwhile boxer Tony Banta on the popular sitcom Taxi. During his Taxi years, Danza built up the screen image of the pugnacious, not overly bright lug with a golden heart. In 1984, Danza was cast as Tony Micelli, the widowed housekeeper of divorced career woman Angela Bower (Judith Light), on the weekly domestic comedy Who's the Boss? enjoying a popular eight-season run. Danza's first starring film role in She's Out of Control (1988), as the overprotective father of teenager Ami Dolenz, was more or less an extension of his TV work; the actor demonstrated a wider range in the supporting role of a dying baseball player in the 1994 remake of Angels in the Outfield. He executive produced The Jerky Boys movie, and continued to appear in projects such as the remake of 12 Angry Men, Glam, and The Garbage-Picking, Field Goal-Killing, Philadelphia Phenome. At the start of the next century he made a handful of appearances as himself on animated shows like Family Guy and King of the Hill, and he appeared in the made-for-TV holiday film Stealing Christmas.

Trivia: Though she is normally recognized as Angela Bower, the prissy, executive counterpart to Tony Danza's rough-hewn Italian nanny on the long-running television series Who's the Boss?, Judith Light considers her crowning achievement to be her activism in the fight against AIDS and gender discrimination. Born in Trenton, NJ, Light discovered her passion for the performing arts at a Pennsylvania summer camp at 12 years old. Light's high school drama teacher later encouraged her to attend the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University, and the young actress found herself with a role in a Broadway production of A Doll's House by the mid-'70s. Despite her initial success, however, Light still found herself extraordinarily poor, at one point living on only ten dollars per week. Rather than holding her back, though, poverty not only increased Light's determination to act, but to use it as a tool in the fight against all forms of bigotry.Light's big break came in the form of One Life to Live, the Emmy-winning soap opera, which offered the aspiring actress a role that brought with it a steady paycheck until the inception of Who's the Boss? in 1983. In addition to her sitcom performances, Light starred with great success in The Ryan White Story, a docudrama concerning the real-life fight of a hemophiliac who contracted the AIDS virus through a blood transfusion. In addition to having established herself as one of the first celebrity activists in the battle against HIV and AIDS, Light also became a passionate volunteer for a variety of charitable organizations including Heart Strings and Project Angel Food.In 1998, after a long, successful stint in the television-movie world, Light flexed her comedy muscles again for The Simple Life, a short-lived television series featuring Light as a big-shot businesswoman whose move to the country is far from what she had expected. A year later, Light immersed herself in Wit, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play revolving around a brash, no-nonsense cancer victim's slow acceptance of her own mortality. In 2004, Light starred in The Stones, a CBS television series. She would go on to star on Ugly Betty and Law & Order: Special Victim's Unit as Judge Elizabeth Donnelly.

Trivia: American actress Katherine Helmond spent nearly thirty years becoming an overnight success. Working fitfully in New York and regional theatre throughout the '50s and '60s, Helmond made ends meet by working as a drama teacher. Her first fleeting film appearances were in the Manhattan-based Believe in Me and The Hospital, both shot in 1971. She received a sizeable role in 1975's The Hindenburg, which utilized local repertory actors from throughout the midwest; she also worked with Hitchcock in 1976's Family Plot. In 1977, Katherine was cast as Jessica Tate, the scatterbrained, hedonistic matriarch on the TV sitcom Soap. She remained with the series until its cancellation in 1981; Soap left poor Jessica Tate facing a firing squad, and didn't reveal her fate until Helmond's guest appearance on the Soap spinoff Benson, wherein she played Jessica's ghost. In 1983, Katherine enrolled in the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop; she helmed the short subject Bankrupt and also several episodes of TV's Who's the Boss, in which she played Mona Robinson from 1984 through 1990. Keeping her hand in films, Katherine Helmond became a favorite of ex-Monty Python director Terry Gilliam, who cast the actress as a vain matron undergoing a really radical facelift in 1984's Brazil.

Trivia: Born and raised in Brooklyn to Italian-American parents, actress Alyssa Milano started acting on the stage in a national tour of Annie at the age of eight. She rose to teen stardom as the tomboyish Samantha Micelli on the ABC sitcom Who's the Boss, which ran from 1984-1992. Never really making the transition to feature films, she appeared in sleazy made-for-TV movies, provocative ad campaigns, and nude photographs. In one of her more prominent TV performances, she portrayed Amy Fisher in Casualties of Love: The "Long Island Lolita" Story on CBS in 1993. Her few feature film credits include the quirky romantic comedy Hugo Pool and the thriller Below Utopia, starring Ice-T. She joined the cast of Melrose Place on FOX for the 1997-1998 season before moving over to the WB for Charmed, co-starring Shannen Doherty and Holly Marie Combs. In the late '90s, she released several pop/rock albums, which did quite well in Japan. Since the popularity of Charmed, she's appeared in major television ad campaigns and the comedies Kiss the Bride, Buying the Cow, and Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. She would go on to enjoy TV runs on My Name is Earl and Romantically Challenged, and movies like Hall Pass and New Year's Eve. In 2013, she returned to being a series regular on TV in the primetime soap Mistresses. After winning several legal battles involving her nude images on the Internet, Milano helped to launch the index safesearching.com.

Trivia: Actor Danny Pintauro first made an impression with audiences as the terrified little boy in the 1983 horror film Cujo. The wide-eyed, blond-haired boy next found his niche on the popular sitcom Who's the Boss?, on which he played the role of Jonathan. After the series ended in 1992, Pintauro initially had trouble finding roles as an adult actor, but after taking time off to study English and theater at Middlesex County College in Edison, NJ, and Stanford University, he found a successful career on the stage, starring in productions such as The Velocity of Gary.

Trivia: Joe Regalbuto has been seen in films since 1982, when he played an investigative reporter in Costa-Gavras' Missing. Before his big-screen debut, Regalbuto played shifty Wall Street lawyer Elliot Streeter in the 1979 TV series The Associates. His other TV roles included Toomey, the CPA assistant to bumbling detective Tim Conway in Ace Crawford, Private Eye (1982), and Harry Fisher in Knots Landing (1985-86 series). Regalbuto also labored in what one journalist described as "relative obscurity" on the TV-movie circuit, playing such roles as William C. Sullivan in 1987's J. Edgar Hoover. In his most famous characterization, Joe Regalbuto travelled full circle from his Missing days, playing investigative reporter Frank Fontana on the TV sitcom Murphy Brown (1988- ).

Trivia: Moved to New York at the age of 18.In 1981, was named Miss Teen All American.Worked as a model.Met her husband, actor Linden Ashby, on the set of Loving.Has worked with her husband in multiple projects, including Loving, Melrose Place, Spy Games, The Young and the Restless, The War Next Door and Teen Wolf.In 2010, briefly returned to The Young and the Restless.

Trivia: A shy and withdrawn child, 11-year-old Paul Sanchez emerged from his shell upon joining Viola Spolin's Children's Theatre Workshop. Even at this early stage of the game, he was a gifted improvisational comedian, delighting friends and theatregoers alike with his inspired flights of fancy. After attending Los Angeles State College, he journeyed to Paris at his own expense, hoping to meet his idols Jean-Louis Barrault and Marcel Marceau. The latter was so impressed by his instinctive talents that he hired the young performer for his prestigious touring mime troupe. Upon returning to the states, he worked with Viola Spolin's son Paul Sills at Chicago's Second City; somewhere along the way, he changed his professional moniker from Sanchez to Sand. He appeared in the popular off-Broadway revue The Mad Show, then linked up with Sills again in Story Theatre, winning a Tony Award for his portrayal of an itching dog! Hired as a general-purpose comic actor by MTM productions at the recommendation of his old Story Theatre-cohort Valerie Harper, Paul was starred in his own sitcom, Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers. This fey, good-natured endeavor was widely touted as the sleeper of the 1974-75 television season. Unfortunately, viewers were not as enchanted by Sands' talents as "live" audiences had been, and Friends and Lovers was axed after 13 weeks. Paul Sand has continued to thrive as a supporting actor in films (his first was 1969's Viva Max) and such TV weeklies as St. Elswhere. Paul Sand's best showing of the 1980s was on the NBC sitcom Gimme a Break, in which he played Marty, an eccentric Manhattan-born restaurateur who posed as a flamboyant Mexican named Esteban for the benefit of his customers.

Trivia: A vaudeville and burlesque comedienne who went on to essay numerous film roles after being discovered at an orphanage at the age of eight, actress Billie Bird would later use her stage experience to entertain troops on 12 USO tours in the 1960s and '70s. Born Bird Berniece Sellen in Pocatello, ID, in February 1908, her chance discovery came when a traveling road show stopped to entertain the children at the orphanage in which she resided and immediately recognized her talent. Subsequently traveling with the troupe and studying with a tutor in her downtime, Bird went on to form a sister act and later appeared in such "light opera" works as Show Boat and New Moon. A move to Los Angeles in 1943 found Bird performing at such hot spots as Club Moderne and The Colony Club, and, from 1947 to 1955, she showed off her skills on the guitar, clarinet, vibraphone, and bagpipes in burlesque shows. Although Bird made her screen debut in the 1921 comedy Grass Widowers, it was the 1950s that found her edging away from the stage and toward television and film. Particularly active in movies in the '50s, Bird appeared in more than a dozen films, including Somebody Loves Me (1952) and The Joker Is Wild (1957). The actress remained relatively active in the '60s, as well, although her career slowed to a notable pace in the '70s with the exception of a featured role in the popular late-'70s sitcom Benson. However, her screen career later picked up momentum with such notable '80s comedies as Sixteen Candles (1984), One Crazy Summer (1986), and Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol (1987), and Bird made a successful return to the world of sitcom television as an aged, but feisty, support-group member in Dear John. Roles in such films as Home Alone (1990) and Dennis the Menace (1993) followed. In 1995, she made her final screen appearance in the Pauly Shore comedy Jury Duty. Stricken with Alzheimer's disease in the '90s, Bird died in November 2002. She was 92.

Trivia: Born Albert Hedison, David Hedison billed himself as Al Hedison when he signed his 20th Century-Fox contract in 1958. He was still Al when he starred in his best-known film, The Fly, as the unfortunate researcher who ends up as lunch for a slavering spider ("Hellllp meeeeee"). By 1959, he was David Hedison, both as leading man of the 17-episode TV series Five Fingers and as romantic lead of still another fantasy film, The Lost World (1960). In 1964, Hedison worked off his Fox contract in the role of Captain Lee Crane in the weekly TVer Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-67). The most amusing episode of that Irwin Allen production was a 1963 entry which utilized generous stock footage from Lost World, with Hedison "out of uniform" so that he could match shots of himself lensed three years earlier. In the last three decades, David Hedison has co-starred in numerous made-for-TV movies, and has been seen on two television soap operas: the daytime Another World and the nighttime The Colbys.

Trivia: Grew up in Meriden, Connecticut, United States.Played baseball, basketball and football in high school.Rejected an offer to play baseball with the Kansas City Athletics.Was co-captain of the football team during his senior year at University of Connecticut.Was a captain in the U.S. Army JAG Corps.

Trivia: Detroit native Lin Shaye studied art history at the University of Michigan before moving to New York to focus on acting. She started landing film and TV roles in the late '70s and early '80s with appearances in movies like The Long Riders, Alone in the Dark, and Brewster's Millions, and began earning a reputation as a memorable character actress. She would become a familiar face for her memorable roles as Mrs. Nuegeboren in 1994's Dumb and Dumber and Magda in 1998's There's Something About Mary, and would continue to take on quirky projects in the years that followed, like in 2006's Snakes on a Plane and 2010's Insidious.

Trivia: Known to many as big sister DJ on the sitcom Full House, actress Candace Cameron followed in the footsteps of her older brother Kirk Cameron, who was an actor on the series Growing Pains. Starting with guest appearances on shows like Alice and St. Elsewhere, Cameron eventually won the role of DJ in 1987, when she was 11 years old. Following the cancellation of Full House in 1995, she continued to act in a wide variety of projects, many under her married name, Candace Cameron Bure, including 1997's Night Scream, 2007's The Wager with Randy Travis, and 2008's Moonlight and Mistletoe.

Trivia: Adolescent actor Damon first appeared onscreen in RoboCop 2 (1990).