Trivia: At first intending to become a minister, actor/monologist Andy Griffith (born June 1st, 1926) became active with the Carolina Playmakers, the prestigious drama-and-music adjunct of the University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill. He spent several seasons portraying Sir Walter Raleigh in the summertime outdoor drama The Lost Colony, spending the rest of the years as a schoolteacher. Griffith continued performing fitfully as an after-dinner speaker on the men's club circuit, developing hilariously bucolic routines on subjects ranging from Shakespeare to football. Under the aegis of agent/producer Richard O. Linke, Griffith returned to acting, attaining stardom in the role of bumptious Air Force rookie Will Stockdale in the TV and Broadway productions of No Time For Sergeants. Before committing Sergeants to film, Griffith made his movie debut in director Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, in which he portrayed an outwardly folksy but inwardly vicious TV personality (patterned, some say, after Arthur Godfrey).After filming Face in the Crowd, No Time for Sergeants and Onionhead for Warner Bros. during the years 1957 and 1958, Griffith starred in a 1959 Broadway musical version of Destry Rides Again; as an added source of income, Griffith ran a North Carolina supermarket. On February 15, 1960 he first appeared as Andy Taylor, the laid-back sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina, on an episode of The Danny Thomas Show. This one-shot was of course the pilot film for the Emmy-winning The Andy Griffith Show, in which Griffith starred from 1960 through 1968. Eternally easygoing on camera, Griffith, who owned 50% of the series, ruled his sitcom set with an iron hand, though he was never as hard on the other actors as he was on himself; to this day, he remains close to fellow Griffith stars Don Knotts and Ron Howard. An unsuccessful return to films with 1969's Angel in My Pocket was followed by an equally unsuccessful 1970 TV series Headmaster. For the next 15 years, Griffith confined himself to guest-star appearances, often surprising his fans by accepting cold-blooded villainous roles. In 1985, he made a triumphal return to series television in Matlock, playing a folksy but very crafty Southern defense attorney. A life-threatening disease known as Gillian-Barre syndrome curtailed his activities in the late 1980s, but as of 1995 Andy Griffith was still raking in the ratings with his infrequent Matlock two-hour specials. The actor worked on and off throughout the late nineties and early 2000s, and co-starred with Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion in the romantic comedy Waitress in 2007.

Trivia: Starred in the 1963 musical Money at the New York theater Upstairs at the Downstairs. Appeared in the original Broadway productions of Mame (1966) and Company (1970). Was an original cast member of Saturday Night Live, though only for the first three episodes. His Oscar-nominated short, The Dove, is a parody of Ingmar Bergman films. Served on the Screen Actors Guild's National Board of Directors.

Trivia: Upon earning his BA degree from the University of Chicago, Fritz Weaver began his formal acting training at the H-B studios. Paying his dues with such regional stock companies as Virginia's Barter Theatre and Massachussett's Group 20 Players, Weaver made his first off-Broadway appearance in a 1954 production of The Way of the World. His inaugural Broadway effort was 1955's The Chalk Circle. Weaver went on to appear in such classic stage roles as Hamlet and Peer Gynt, and also amassed a remarkable list of film credits, including two Twilight Zone appearances. In 1964, he made his film debut as the unstable Colonel Caserio in the doomsday thriller Fail Safe. The following year, he starred on Broadway in Baker Street, a musicalization of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. In 1970, he won the Tony award for his work as Jerome Malley in Child's Play. Most often cast as aristocratic villains in films (his resemblance to William F. Buckley has not gone unnoticed by producers), Fritz Weaver made his biggest international impact in the sympathetic role of Josef Weiss in the TV miniseries Holocaust (1978). Weaver worked mostly in television for the rest of his career (save for a supporting role in 1999's The Thomas Crown Affair), with guest spots in shows like The Love Boat, Murder, She Wrote, The X-Files, Frasier and Law & Order. Weaver died in 2016, at age 90.

Trivia: Sturdy, reliable character player Kene Holliday specialized in portrayals of vociferous everymen, with a strong emphasis on television work. Holliday landed one of his first major roles in the small-screen blockbuster Roots: The Next Generations (as Detroit, one of the direct descendants of the iconic Kunta Kinte), and subsequently divided his time between occasional big-screen features (No Small Affair, The Philadelphia Experiment), series work (with many appearances on Matlock), and TV movies, such as the 1988 Dangerous Company. Holliday tackled a rare yet effective lead role in the much-anticipated 2007 drama Great World of Sound, as Clarence, a well-meaning record producer in training who discovers that his parent company isn't exactly all that it professes to be.

Trivia: Lead actor, onscreen from 1985.

Trivia: Having made her feature film debut in Sex and the College Girl (1964), blonde actress Julie Sommars went on to appear in television movies of the '70s and in the occasional feature film through the mid-'80s. Fans of the television drama Matlock (1986-1995) will recognize her for playing Julie March.