Trivia: Best known as the rumpled television detective Columbo, character actor Peter Falk also enjoyed a successful film career, often in association with the groundbreaking independent filmmaker John Cassavetes. Born September 16, 1927, in New York City, Falk lost an eye at the age of three, resulting in the odd, squinting gaze which later became his trademark. He initially pursued a career in public administration, serving as an efficiency expert with the Connecticut Budget Bureau, but in the early '50s, boredom with his work sparked an interest in acting. By 1955, Falk had turned professional, and an appearance in a New York production of The Iceman Cometh earned him much attention. He soon graduated to Broadway and in 1958 made his feature debut in the Nicholas Ray/Budd Schulberg drama Wind Across the Everglades.A diminutive, stocky, and unkempt presence, Falk's early screen roles often portrayed him as a blue-collar type or as a thug; it was as the latter in 1960's Murder Inc. that he earned a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, a major career boost. He was nominated in the same category the following year as well, this time as a sarcastic bodyguard in Frank Capra's Pocketful of Miracles. In 1962, Falk won an Emmy for his work in the television film The Price of Tomatoes, a presentation of the Dick Powell Theater series. The steady stream of accolades made him a hot property, and he next starred in the 1962 feature Pressure Point. A cameo in Stanley Kramer's 1963 smash It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World preceded Falk's appearance in the Rat Pack outing Robin and the Seven Hoods, but the film stardom many predicted for him always seemed just out of reach, despite lead roles in 1965's The Great Race and 1967's Luv.In 1968, Falk first assumed the role of Columbo, the disheveled police lieutenant whose seemingly slow and inept investigative manner masked a steel-trap mind; debuting in the TV movie Prescription: Murder, the character was an immediate hit, and after a second telefilm, Ransom for a Dead Man, a regular Columbo series premiered as part of the revolving NBC Mystery Movie anthology in the fall of 1971, running for seven years and earning Falk a second Emmy in the process. In the meantime, he also continued his film career, most notably with Cassavetes; in 1970, Falk starred in the director's Husbands, and in 1974 they reunited for the brilliant A Woman Under the Influence. In between the two pictures, Falk also returned to Broadway, where he won a Tony award for his performance in the 1972 Neil Simon comedy The Prisoner of Second Avenue. In 1976, Cassavetes joined him in front of the camera to co-star in Elaine May's Mikey and Nicky, and directed him again in 1977's Opening Night.After Columbo ceased production in 1978, Falk starred in the Simon-penned mystery spoof The Cheap Detective, followed by the William Friedkin caper comedy The Brink's Job (1978). After 1979's The In-Laws, he starred two years later in ...All the Marbles, but was then virtually absent from the screen for the next half decade. Cassavetes' 1986 effort Big Trouble brought Falk back to the screen (albeit on a poor note; Cassavetes later practically disowned the embarrassing film) and and in 1987 he starred in Happy New Year along with the Rob Reiner cult favorite The Princess Bride. An appearance as himself in Wim Wenders' masterful Wings of Desire in 1988 preceded his 1989 resumption of the Columbo character for another regular series; the program was to remain Falk's focus well into the next decade, with only a handful of film appearances in pictures including 1990's Tune in Tomorrow and a cameo in Robert Altman's The Player. After the cancellation of Columbo, he next turned up in Wenders' Desire sequel Far Away, So Close before starring in the 1995 comedy Roommates. Falk continued to work in both film and television for the next decade and a half, starring in various Columbo specials through 2003, appearing with Woody Allen in the made-for-TV The Sunshine Boys in 1997, and playing a bar owner caught up in mafia dealings in 1999's The Money Kings. Other projects included the Adam Sandler-produced gangster comedy Corky Romano (2001), the Dreamworks animated family film A Shark Tale (as the voice of Ira Feinberg), and the Paul Reiser-scripted, Raymond de Felitta-directed comedy-drama The Thing About My Folks (2005). In 2007, Falk starred opposite Nicolas Cage and Julianne Moore in Lee Tamahori's sci-fi thriller Next. That same year, Falk announced to the public that he had Alzheimer's disease. He died in June 2011 at age 83.

Trivia: A popular screen figure of the 1980s and '90s whose casting in HBO's runaway hit series Sex and the City provided her career with a solid second wind, Emmy-winning actress Kim Cattrall has endured to prove that older women can retain their sexuality and femininity while simultaneously maintaining a vital screen presence. Born in Liverpool, England, Cattrall's parents immigrated the family to Vancouver Island, British Columbia, when the future actress was three years old. After returning to England at age 11 to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, Cattrall finished high school in Vancouver, and at age 16 struck out on her own after winning a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. Though director Otto Preminger would sign Cattrall to a five-year contract and give the actress her film debut in Rosebud (1975), Universal would soon step in to buy out her contract, making Cattrall one of the last actors to participate in the now defunct Universal Contract Player System. Following with television appearances in Starskey and Hutch and Charlie's Angels, and turning up in such features as Deadly Harvest (1977), it appeared as if good things were in store for Cattrall in the future. The dawn of the 1980s found Cattrall's star ascending in such features as Porky's (1981), and with the release of Police Academy in 1984 her face was becoming a familiar one to film and television audiences.Following up with such typically '80s fare as Turk 182! (1985), Cattrall essayed the role of the green-eyed girl whose fate was questionable in John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China (1986), the year before her most famous (until Sex and the City of course) role in Mannequin (1987). Essentially a typical '80s throwaway comedy, Cattrall's effervescent presence, combined with Starship's catchy title tune "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now," gave the film such a boost that it even spawned a Cattrall-less sequel. It was following Mannequin that Cattrall's career began to stall in the wake of such instantly forgettable films as Honeymoon Academy (1990) and the Gary Busey actioner Breaking Point (1993), though her role in 1995's Live Nude Girls proved a curious precursor to her role on Sex and the City. A frank and funny HBO series based on the writings of New York Observer columnist Candace Bushnell, Sex and the City gave Cattrall a chance to shine as a lusty an unabashedly sexual PR executive whose confidence in the bedroom rivals only her confidence in the boardroom. A runaway hit that's popularity only grew as the show entered is sixth season, Sex and the City once again made Cattrall a household name as it influenced everything from fashion to the drinks of the New York scene. Cattrall's character made her a bigger pop culture icon than ever, and she would stick with the franchise throughout its spin-off movies, while also appearing in feature films like Ice Princess and The Ghost Writer.

Trivia: Born in California in 1936, Joel Fabiani went through a multitude of schools and jobs, in addition to a stint in the army, before returning to college, where he first started acting. Based in San Francisco, he trained at the Actors' Workshop and later moved to New York, where he began working in commercials. His first major acting credit was in the feature-length pilot episode for the television series Ironside. He later appeared on such prime time network shows as N.Y.P.D. and Marcus Welby, M.D., in addition to daytime dramas, including Dark Shadows and The Doctors. Fabiani's major bid for TV stardom came when he was spotted by producers of the British series Department S, who were putting together the cast and needed a muscular American to play Stewart Sullivan, the team's man of action. The series was sold around the world and ran in the U.S. (among other countries) for its 28-show 1969-1970 season. Fabiani returned to America after the series was over and did extensive television work -- including appearances on Columbo, The Cosby Show, and Murder, She Wrote -- and occasional film work, with roles in Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Reuben, Reuben. He also had a long run on the soap opera All My Children beginning in 1999.

Trivia: Lead actress, onscreen from the '70s.

Trivia: The son of character actor Ed Begley, Sr., he began acting while still a teenager, appearing on the TV series My Three Sons when he was 17. Begley performed as a stand-up comic at colleges and nightclubs and worked briefly as a TV cameraman before landing a string of guest appearances on TV series such as Happy Days and Columbo. He debuted onscreen in Now You See Him, Now You Don't (1972), going on to play small roles in a number of minor films; by the mid '70s he was getting somewhat better roles in better films. Begley became well-known in the '80s, portraying Dr. Erlich on the TV series St. Elsewhere; for his work he received an Emmy nomination. His success on TV led to much better film roles, but he has never broken through as a big-screen star.

Trivia: Trained at the RSC, Scottish actor Nicol Williamson made his professional bow with the Dundee rep in 1960. The following year, he performed with the Arts Theatre at Cambridge, and also made his London debut. His first major success came in 1964 with John Obsorne's Inadmissible Evidence. He won a Tony award for his performance in the Osborne play when it transferred to Broadway in 1965, and three years later repeated his characterization for the film version. Williamson's 1968 staging of Hamlet, which like Evidence played in both London and New York, was immensely popular and enormously controversial; some recall the night when, halfway through a soliloquy, Williamson brusquely apologized for his "bad" performance and stormed offstage. In films from 1964, Williamson played a cocaine-benumbed Sherlock Holmes in The 7 Percent Solution (1977), an introspective Little John in Robin and Marian (1978) and an eccentric Merlin in Excalibur (1981). His TV credits on both sides of the Atlantic included such roles as Lennie in Of Mice and Men, Lord Mountbatten in The Last Viceroy, King Ferdinand in the 1995 TV movie Christopher Columbus, and Richard Nixon in a 1974 dramatization of the White House Tapes. Williamson also appeared in a number of one-man shows, including the off-Broadway Nicol Williamson's Late Show and a 1994 play based on the life of John Barrymore. Nicol Williamson was married to actress Jill Townsend.