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: 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: Fresh from the Marquette University drama department, Charles Siebert continued his theatrical studies at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. Upon his graduation, Siebert and his wife had become so enchanted with England that he attempted to extend his visa by claiming that he'd gotten a job as a jazz-dancing teacher--a ruse that worked for a full year before he was found out. Following his professional debut in a Morristown, New Jersey production of Oedipus Rex, Siebert sought out work on Broadway, paying the rent by appearing in such TV daytime dramas as Search for Tomorrow and As the World Turns, and accepting roles in what Siebert would later describe as "The God Shows:" Sunday-morning religious anthologies like Lamp Unto My Feet, Look Up and Live and The Eternal Light. In the late 1960s, he bemusedly found himself the subject of media attention when he appeared in the play The Changing Room, which featured one of Broadway's first all-male nude scenes. Moving to Hollywood in 1976, Siebert quickly became a member in good standing of producer Norman Lear's talent pool, guesting on such series as All in the Family and Maude and appearing regularly as Mr. Davenport on One Day at a Time. While he has appeared in a number of films and had recurring roles on several weekly series, Charles Siebert is best known for his work as ivy-league doctor Stanley Riverside II on the TV medical drama Trapper John MD (1979-1986).

Trivia: Long-time character actor James Cromwell has spent much of his career on stage and television, only occasionally appearing in feature films until the early '90s, when his film work began to flourish. The tall, spare actor first became known to an international audience with his role as the taciturn but kindly Farmer Hoggett, the owner of a piglet that wants to be a sheepdog, in the smash hit Babe (1995). His work in the film earned Cromwell an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, as well as numerous opportunities for steady work in Hollywood.The son of noted director John Cromwell and actress Kay Johnson, he originally aspired to become a mechanical engineer, attending both Vermont's Middlebury College and the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). But after a summer spent on a movie set with his father, the acting bug bit, and Cromwell decided to become an actor. He started out in regional theater, acting and directing in a variety productions for ten years, and he was a regular performer at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. Cromwell made his television debut in the recurring role of "Stretch" Cunningham on All in the Family in 1974, and he subsequently spent the rest of the decade and much of the 1980s on television, as a regular on such shows as Hot L Baltimore and The Last Precinct. Cromwell also appeared in such miniseries as NBC's Once an Eagle and in such made-for-television movies as A Christmas Without Snow (1980). Cromwell made his feature film debut in the comedy Murder By Death (1976). His film work was largely undistinguished until Babe; following the film's success, he began appearing in more substantial roles in a number of popular films, including The People Vs. Larry Flynt (1996), in which he played Charles Keating; Star Trek: First Contact (1996), which cast him as the reluctant scientist responsible for Earth's first contact with alien life forms; and L.A. Confidential (1997), in which he gave a marvelously loathsome performance as a crooked police captain. Adept at playing nice guys and bottom-dwelling scum alike, Cromwell next earned strong notices for his portrayal of a penitentiary warden in The Green Mile (1999).The respected character actor continued strongly into the next decade with appearances in Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys as well as the live-on-TV production of Fail Safe in 2000. He enjoyed a recurring role on E.R. in 2001. He played the president in the 2002 Jack Ryan movie The Sum of All Fears. In 2003 he took on a recurring role in the respected HBO drama Six Feet Under, and also appeared in the award-winning HBO adaptation of Angels in America. In 2006 he acted opposite Helen Mirren playing Prince Philip in The Queen, and played another head of state for Oliver Stone when he portrayed George Herbert Walker Bush in the biopic W. In 2011 he was the loyal butler to the main character in the Best Picture Oscar winner for that year, The Artist.

Trivia: Connecticut native Linda Purl grew up in Japan, where her father, a Union Carbide executive, had been transferred. Under the watchful eye of her mother, a former ballerina, Purl began acting professionally in Japanese stage and TV productions at the age of seven. Ten years later, she made her American film debut in Jory (1972). Never a conventional ingenue, she has played everything from mentally retarded teens to rape victims to psychotic killers, as well as a few real-life personalities like Alice Roosevelt Longworth and globetrotting journalist Nellie Bly. Purl has the distinction of playing two different recurring characters on the same television series. During the 1974-75 season of Happy Days, she was seen as Richie Cunningham's (Ron Howard) high-school girlfriend Gloria; she returned to the series in 1982 as Ashler Pfister, a divorced mother with whom Fonzie (Henry Winkler) was briefly involved romantically. Linda has also appeared regularly on such series as The Secret Storm and Beacon Hill; more recently, she played an assistant DA put in charge of a group of young ex-convicts on the syndicated weekly adventure series Robin's Hoods (1994). Linda Purl was at one time married to Desi Arnaz Jr..

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.

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: An Iranian actress whose strong political beliefs almost led her to a career as a journalist, Shohreh Aghdashloo decided instead that she could reach more people by working in film and theater -- and with her Oscar-nominated role in the tragedy House of Sand and Fog, she found an audience the size of which she never dreamed possible. Born in Tehran in 1952 to an intellectual, creative family, Aghdashloo was drawn to the theater at an early age, and by her twenties was performing in various cutting-edge performance groups, among them the acclaimed Drama Workshop of Tehran. Filmmakers often drew upon talent from the Workshop, and Aghdashloo was cast by directors Abbas Kiarostami and Ali Hatami -- two towering figures of the nascent Iranian New Wave -- to play starring roles in several of their formally adventurous, socially progressive productions, including 1977's Gozaresh and Sutedelan.But in the late '70s, with the Ayatollah Khomeini reintroducing an era of strict rule based on religious doctrine, Aghdashloo's work as a performer was either censored or forbidden outright. Eager to escape the turmoil of the Iranian Revolution, Aghdashloo left her husband and her career to go to London, where she earned a degree in international relations. She was on the verge of accepting a position at a newspaper when a friend presented her with a play, called Rainbow, about the Revolution and its discontents. He had written a role specifically for her, and Aghdashloo believed in the project enough to put her journalism career on hold -- for what would turn out to be an indefinite length of time. Rainbow was such a success, it toured the United States, where Aghdashloo was reunited with a Workshop colleague of hers, Houshang Touzie; a romance soon developed, and two married in Los Angeles in the late '80s.Discouraged by the dearth of non-stereotyped roles for Middle Eastern women in Hollywood, Aghdashloo focused her attention instead on stage work, even creating a traveling theater troupe with her husband that performed plays in Farsi for Iranian audiences. Her occasional film work included roles in such topical dramas as America So Beautiful and Maryam, both about the struggle of Iranian immigrants in the U.S. It was such work that caught the attention of director Vadim Perelman, who was looking to cast the supporting role of Nadi in his big-screen adaptation of the bestseller House of Sand and Fog. Perelman and his casting agent contacted Aghdashloo directly -- at the time, the actress had no agent or manager -- and were soon convinced that she was the woman for the part. Having read the book upon its release, Aghdashloo had long envisioned ways that she could play Nadi, a strong but subservient Iranian-American wife and mother caught between her husband's wishes and her own conscience. Opposite the formidable Ben Kingsley in a cast of established performers, Aghdashloo's subtle, simmering performance brought her kudos from the New York Film Critics and Los Angeles Film Critics Associations, both of whom named her 2003's Best Supporting Actress. The Academy followed suit, nominating her against such Hollywood stalwarts as Renée Zellweger and Holly Hunter.Following a recurring role on the wildly popular television hit 24 that served well to introduce the increasingly prominant actress to audiences outside of the art-house circuit, Aghdashloo turned in impressive supporting performances in such popular wide release films as The Exorcism of Emily Rose, American Dreamz, and X-Men: The Last Stand. In 2006 Aghdashloo would heed the call of Hollywood once again to take a featured role as the best friend of Sandra Bullock's lonely character in the romantic fantasy remake The Lake House. She went on appear in The Stoning of Soraya M., The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and House of Saddam, and narrated the documentaries Iranium and For Neda.

Trivia: A character actor with a deadpan delivery, Earl Boen is known to many for the role of psychiatrist Peter Silberman in Terminator, a role he reprised for the hit sequel Terminator 2: Judgement Day, as well as for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. A veteran of TV, film, and stage, Boen spent decades racking up a résumé packed with literally hundreds of appearances beginning in the early '70s. Many of Boen's credits came in the form of single-episode guest appearances on TV shows like The Paper Chase and M*A*S*H, while others took the form of recurring roles, like that of adman Jim Petersen on the sitcom Who's the Boss?, a role Boen would reprise for five episodes between 1984 and 1986. Boen also worked extensively in animation, lending his voice to cartoons like Justice League, Kim Possible, and Pirates of Dark Water, as well as many video games, such as World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and EverQuest.