Trivia: Made his feature-film debut in the religious thriller Tribulation (2000). Was nominated for a 2002 Young Artist Award for his work on the CBS drama The Guardian. Landed his first series-regular role on the CBS cult favorite Jericho.

Trivia: Brittany Murphy first came to the attention of film audiences as Tai, one of Alicia Silverstone's airhead friends, in the 1995 comedy Clueless. Though convincing as a dim-bulb character, Murphy cuts dramatically against this grain off-camera, as a ferociously intelligent and ambitious young performer who had acting in her blood from early childhood. As a teenager and young adult, she gave expression to the scope of her talent and versatility with a series of engaging film and television roles.Born in Atlanta on November 10, 1977, Murphy was raised by her single mother in Edison, New Jersey; she later indicated, in interviews, that her mom struggled financially - that they were forced to eat spaghetti night after night, and that on certain occasions, she had to beg her mother to buy clothes at KMart; this would later account for Murphy's marked social investment in homeless causes, as discussed in a February 2003 Glamour article.A precocious child who began putting on shows when she was a toddler, Murphy was acting in regional theatre productions by the age of nine. Work in various commercials followed, and in 1990 she landed her first television appearance at the age of twelve, on the sitcom Blossom. She also secured a supporting role as Brenda Drexell, the fourteen-year-old daughter of Dabney Coleman's fifth grade teacher Otis Drexell, on the (mercifully) short-lived 1991 FOX sitcom Drexell's Class. The following year, Murphy took her first cinematic bow in the dysfunctional family drama Family Prayers. Murphy's talent for portraying, dramatically, all degrees on the spectrum of behavioral dysfunction further came to light in three successive projects through 1999: the blackly comic Reese Witherspoon trailer trash odyssey Freeway (1996) (as a disfigured lesbian who befriends Witherspoon's Vanessa); a mental patient in Lloyd Kramer's made-for-TV David and Lisa (1998), and James Mangold's Girl, Interrupted (1999) (as yet another resident at a mental institution).Meanwhile, on a less ambitious (albeit more whimsical) note, Murphy also became a fixtureon King of the Hill, Mike Judge's long-running contemporary cartoon of suburban life in the southern U.S., as Luanne Platter, the hair stylist niece who comes to live with Hank Hill's family. Murphy kept a full plate as the millennium wrapped. In addition to her work for Mangold in 1999,she also explored the collective insanity of the beauty pageant world in Drop Dead Gorgeous, while on the small screen, she covered much darker thematic ground with the well-received Holocaust drama The Devil's Arithmetic (also 1999). In 2001, Murphy appeared in the Michael Douglas thriller Don't Say a Word, and alongside Drew Barrymore in Riding in Cars With Boys.Cast opposite Eminem in director Curtis Hanson's 2002 drama 8 Mile, Murphy performed compellingly as an aspiring rap star's unapologetic muse; in 2004, Murphy headlined Nick Hurran's thoroughly disappointing rom-com Little Black Book. She also made a splash in Robert Rodriguez's innovative graphic novel adaptation Sin City, as the arrogant waitress who becomes the prize in a heated rivalry between Benicio del Toro and Clive Owen. Murphy made appearances in four features in 2006. In Alex Keshishian's progressive romantic comedy Love and Other Disasters, she played a London-based American expatriate, employed at Vogue, who tries to fix up her gay roommate; in Ed Burns's sixth directorial outing, the Big Chill-like romantic comedy The Groomsmen, she played the expectant girlfriend of Burns's Paulie. She also portrayed a member of the ensemble in Karen Moncrieff's murder mystery The Dead Girl, about a group of seemingly disconnected individuals whose lives intersect as a girl's murderer comes to light, and one of the lead voices in George "Babe" Miller's Happy Feet, an animated penguin tale.Murphy's appearance alongside Ashton Kutcher in Just Married was - to some degree - a case of art imitating life: offscreen, Murphy and Kutcher began to date as well (and became a hot tabloid item), though unlike their onscreen counterparts, they never wed.In the several years that followed, Murphy remained active, both in front of and behind the camera; she lent her voice to the CG-animated George Miller comedy Happy Feet (2006), and starred in and produced a Robert Allan Ackerman directed comedy-drama, The Ramen Girl, that suggested tremendous promise (though it went straight to home video). Murphy also starred in a made-for-television movie on the Lifetime network, Nora Roberts' Tribute (2009). That marked the end of her career, however: the actress's life was tragically cut short when she died in December 2009 at the age of 32.

Trivia: Born August 28th, 2969, Jason Priestley began his own career as a child actor in TV commercials. After dropping out of acting in his teens to concentrate on high-school sports, Priestley got back in the professional swim following graduation, accepting one-shot roles on such Canada-based TV series as 21 Jump Street. The young actor's first American TV assignment was the regular role of teen orphan Todd Mahaffey on the 1989 sitcom Sister Kate. Producer Aaron Spelling's daughter Tori spotted Priestley on Sister Kate and suggested that her father audition him for a role in the upcoming Fox series Beverly Hills 90210. Priestley was cast as Brandon Walsh, twin brother of the estimable Brenda (Shannen Doherty).Like many of his young series co-stars, Priestley was intent on laying the groundwork for life after 90210. Though his first major film role in Penny Marshall's Calendar Girl (1993) came and went without fanfare, he enjoyed some success as a 90210 director. Priestley encountered further success and even critical vindication with his turn as Ronnie Bostock, the B-movie hunk who steals John Hurt's heart in Love and Death on Long Island (1997). Critics warmed to Priestley's performance, noting that his days of idolatry had given him overly adequate preparation for his portrayal. Unlike other teen idols who rue the day when the fan mail will cease, Priestley once claimed he was happy that his idoldom seems to be on a downward slide: "It's like having a big cancerous lesion on your shoulder. Because people are fickle, man." On March 28, 2000, Priestley was undoubtedly happy that the limelight's glare had dimmed: Arrested for drunken driving after crashing his car into some trash cans, he was sentenced to five days in a Los Angeles jail. Legal troubles aside, Priestly continued to appear in films throughout the 2000s (Cherish, Die Mommie Die, Homicide: The Movie), and joined Joss Whedon's Tru Calling in the role of Jack Harper, a man determined that the dead not be revived by Tru. Television continued to be a superior medium for the actor who made guest appearances on My Name is Earl, What I Like About You, and Without a Trace. Priestly stars as corrupt used-car salesman Richard "Fitz" Fitzpatrick" in HBO Canada's Call Me Fitz, and is a recurring character on Haven, a supernatural television series from Syfy.

Trivia: The daughter of a mining engineer, Canadian actress Margot Kidder spent her first two-and-a-half years living in a caboose. While attending the University of British Columbia, Kidder was talked into appearing in a college stage production of Take Me Along; she was hooked, though she later learned there was more to acting than crying on cue and partying. In her first professional years with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation headquarters in Vancouver, Kidder played everything from simpering ingenues to an unhinged murderess. She made her first film in 1969, an American production titled Gaily Gaily, then worked with Gene Wilder in the British-made Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970). Kidder disliked the seamier side of the movie business and retreated to Canada in hopes of learning how to become a film editor, but was brought back to the U.S. in 1971 for a continuing role in the James Garner TV series Nichols. She liked Garner but not the hassles of making a weekly series, and for the next decade concentrated on film work, plunging headfirst into a kinky Brian DePalma chiller titled Sisters (1972). Kidder's best-known work in the '70s and '80s was as Lois Lane in the Superman films starring Christopher Reeve. Other movie roles and a stint on 1987 TV series Shell Game followed. She continued to work steadily in a variety of projects including 1988's Body of Evidence, White Room, and Hanry & Verlin, however she earned the most press she had in quite some time after a bizarre incident in 1996 where she went missing for a few days and was found dazed and confused outside a stranger's home in Glendale, California. She recovered and went back to work in numerous films and TV series including Touched By an Angel and Tribulation. She was a major figure in Peter Biskind's book about '70s cinema, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and figured prominently in the documentary made from that book. In 2007 she appeared on the reality program Who Do You Think You Are, and went on to act in Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween II.Kidder married and divorced writer Tom McGuane and actor John Heard (their union lasted six days!) and remains a vocal activist for political and ecological causes.

Trivia: Mimi Rogers spent her youth moving around with her family to various parts of the U.S. and England; she settled in Los Angeles. Graduating from high school at age 14, she became involved with community work and working with drug addicts, Vietnam vets, and the mentally retarded. She didn't begin acting until her early 20s. Rogers debuted onscreen in Blue Skies Again (1983) as the manager of a girl who wants to join a baseball team. She didn't make another film for three years, meanwhile working extensively on TV; she had regular roles on the TV series "Paper Dolls" and "The Rousers," made guest appearances on a number of shows, and appeared in a few TV movies. She began making her reputation as a screen actress with her portrayal of a Manhattan heiress in Ridley Scott's Someone to Watch Over Me (1987), her fourth film. Most of her films have been unsuccessful, and she has yet to attain star status. For three years she was married to actor Tom Cruise.

Trivia: Chicago-born actor Brian Kerwin's film appearances have been more plentiful on the small screen than on the large. Kerwin has been costarred on such TV movies as Bluegrass (1983), A Real American Hero (1978), The Challenger (1990) (as doomed astronaut Capt. Michael Smith) and Against Her Will: An Incident in Baltimore (1992). He also had regular roles on the TV series The Chisholms (1979), and on Lobo (1980), playing the handsomer of Sheriff Claude Akins' two deputies. In addition, Brian Kerwin played Michelle Pfeiffer's married lover in the 1987 PBS adaptation of John O'Hara's Natica Jackson.