Trivia: Redheaded leading lady Marilu Henner was born and educated in Chicago, where her mother ran a dance studio in the family garage. Henner also began her acting career in City of Broad Shoulders. She was one of the stars of the original community-theatre production of Grease, remaining with the show when it moved to New York in 1976 (During this period, she carried on a well-publicized romance with former Grease cast member John Travolta). She went on to garner excellent revues for her work in the Broadway production Over Here, an otherwise disappointing musical spoof of the 1940s starring the Andrews Sisters. Henner began making on-camera appearances in 1977, notably as a stripper in Joan Micklin Silver's Behind the Lines, and in a generously distributed "Ring Around the Collar!" TV commercial. From 1978 through 1983, Henner played Elaine Nardo on the popular TV sitcom Taxi. Though she never won the Emmy that she deserved for this role, she could take consolation in the fact that she was made an honorary New York City cabbie. Several film roles followed in such low-profile productions as Hammet (1983) and Johnny Dangerously (1984) before Henner re-entered the sitcom grind as Ava Evans Newton, wife of high-school athletics coach Burt Reynolds, on the long-running (1990-94) Evening Shade. In 1994, Henner hosted her own TV talk show, a career move that coincided with the publication of her autobiography By All Means Keep on Moving. Chatty and very candid, the book revealed that Henner had slept with virtually every male member of the Taxi cast (only Danny DeVito was bypassed because, unlike his hot-to-trot Louie DePalma character, he never asked). Marilu Henner has been married twice, to actor Frederic Forrest and producer/director Robert Lieberman. Still active on the small screen in the first decade of the new millennium, Henner could be spotted in guest roles on such popular shows as Providence, ER, Numb3rs, and Grey's Anatomy.

Trivia: The son of a Czech-American golf pro, Jon Voight was active in student theatricals in high school and at Catholic University. In 1960 he began studying privately with Neighborhood Playhouse mentor Sanford Meisner, and made his off-Broadway debut that same year in O Oysters, receiving a daunting review which opined that he could "neither walk nor talk." Fortunately, Voight persevered, and in 1961 took over the role of "singing Nazi" Rolf in the Broadway hit The Sound of Music (his Liesl was Laurie Peters, who became his first wife).Blessed with handsome, Nordic features, Voight kept busy as a supporting player on such TV series as Gunsmoke, Coronet Blue, and NYPD, and in 1966 spent a season with the California National Shakespeare Festival. The following year, he won a Theatre World Award for his stage performance in That Summer, That Fall. Thus, by the time he became an "overnight" star in the role of wide-eyed hustler Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy (1969), he had nearly a decade's worth of experience under his belt. The success of Midnight Cowboy, which earned Voight an Oscar nomination, prompted a fast-buck distributor to ship out a double feature of two never-released mid-'60s films: Fearless Frank, filmed in 1965, starred Voight as a reluctant superhero, while Madigan's Millions was a 1968 turkey featuring Voight's Cowboy co-star (and longtime friend) Dustin Hoffman.Entering the 1970s with dozens of producers clamoring for his services, Voight refused to accept roles that banked merely on his youth and good looks. Instead, he selected such challenging assignments as crack-brained Army officer Milo Minderbinder in Catch 22 (1970), a political activist known only as "A" in The Revolutionary (also 1970), reluctant rugged individualist Ed Gentry in Deliverance (1972), and real-life teacher/novelist Pat Conroy in Conrack (1974). In 1978, he won both the Oscar and the Cannes Film Festival award for his portrayal of paraplegic Vietnam veteran Luke Martin in Hal Ashby's Coming Home. The following year, he earned additional acclaim for his work in the remake of The Champ.Devoting increasing amounts of time to his various sociopolitical causes in the 1980s and 1990s, Voight found it more and more difficult to fit film roles into his busy schedule. A reunion project with Ashby, on the godawful gambling comedy Lookin' to Get Out (produced 1980, released 1982), failed dismally, with many reviewers complaining about Voight's terrible, overmodulated performance, and the paper-thin script, which the actor himself wrote. Voight weathered the storm, however, and enjoyed box-office success as star of the 1983 weeper Table for Five. He also picked up another Oscar nomination for Andrei Konchalovsky's existential thriller Runaway Train (1985), and acted in such socially-conscious TV movies as Chernobyl: The Final Warning (1991) and The Last of His Tribe (1992). He also produced Table for Five and scripted 1990's Eternity. Voight kept busy for the remainder of the decade, appearing in such films as Michael Mann's Heat (1995), Mission: Impossible (1996), and The General, a 1998 collaboration with Deliverance director John Boorman, for which Voight won acclaim in his role as an Irish police inspector. During the same period of time, a bearded Voight also essayed a wild one-episode cameo on Seinfeld - as himself - with a scene that required him to bite the hand of Cosmo Kramer from a parked vehicle. In 1999, Voight gained an introduction to a new generation of fans, thanks to his role as James Van Der Beek's megalomaniacal football coach in the hit Varsity Blues, later appearing in a handful of other films before teaming onscreen with daughter Angelina Jolie for Tomb Raider in 2001. After essaying President Roosevelt later that same year in Pearl Harbor, Voight went for laughs in Ben Stiller's male-model comedy Zoolander, though his most pronounced role of 2001 would come in his Oscar nominated performance as iconic newsman Howard Cosell in director Michael Mann's Mohammad Ali biopic, Ali.Taken collectively, all of Voight's aformentioned roles during the mid-late 1990s demonstrated a massive rebound, from the gifted lead of '70s American classics to a character actor adept at smaller and more idiosyncratic character roles in A-list Hollywood fare ( the very same transition, for instance, that Burt Reynolds was wrongly predicted to be making when he signed to do Breaking In back in 1989). To put it another way: though Voight rarely received first billing by this point, his volume of work per se soared high above that of his most active years during the '70s. The parts grew progressively more interesting as well; Voight was particularly memorable, for instance, in the Disney comedy-fantasy Holes, as Mr. Sir, the cruel, sadistic right-hand-man to camp counselor Sigourney Weaver, who forces packs of young boys to dig enormous desert pits beneath the blazing sun for a mysterious reason. Voight then signed for a series of parts under the aegis of longtime-fan Jerry Bruckheimer, including the first two National Treasure installments (as John Patrick Henry) and - on a higher-profiled note - the audience-rouser Glory Road (2005), about one of the first all-black basketball teams in the U.S.; in that picture, Voight plays Adolph Rupp, the infamous University of Kentucky coach (nicknamed 'Baron of the Bluegrass') with an all-white team vying against the competitors at the center of the story.In 2007, Voight tackled roles in two very different high-profile films: he played one of the key characters in Michael Bay's live-action extravaganza Transformers, and portrayed a Mormon bishop who perishes in a Brigham Young-instigated massacre, in the period drama September Dawn, directed by Christopher Cain (Young Guns. He appeared in 24: Redemption, and became a part of that show's regular cast for its seventh season. Voight is the father of Angelina Jolie, and has often been the subject of tabloid coverage because of their occasionally fraught public bickering.

Trivia: One of Britain's most acclaimed directors, John Boorman is known for making films resplendent with great visual flair and taut narrative. Boorman is also known as one of the commercial mainstream's more independently-minded directors; his high-risk approach to filmmaking has insured that his films are as economically unpredictable as they are unique. Boorman himself has been quoted as saying "Filmmaking is the process of turning money into light and then back into money again," an epigram whose simplicity has in many ways defined the ups and downs of his career.A native of London, where he was born January 18, 1933, Boorman attended a Jesuit school and held down a series of non-descript jobs before he started writing film reviews and working as an editor for the BBC. By 1962, he was the head of the Bristol BBC documentary unit. Three years later, he directed his first fictional film, the whimsical, loosely structured Having a Wild Weekend, which starred the Dave Clark Five. Rather than resembling just another Hard Day's Night rip-off, the film was distinctive and original enough to earn Boorman recognition as an innovative stylist by a number of prestigious publications.Following more work for the BBC, Boorman made his Hollywood directing debut in 1967 with Point Blank. Starring Lee Marvin as a gangster obsessed with getting revenge on the Organization that once wronged him, the film was seen as an elegant exploration of the increasing depersonalization of life in the modern urban world. It also went on to become recognized as one of the definitive Hollywood films of the late '60s, occupying a place in the groundbreaking Hollywood New Wave next to such classics as Bonnie and Clyde.Following another collaboration with Marvin on the allegorical Hell in the Pacific (1968), which cast the actor as a WWII soldier stranded on an island with a Japanese soldier (Toshiro Mifune), Boorman made Leo the Last (1970). A surreal tale of London culture clash, it starred Marcello Mastrioanni as an Italian aristocrat living in London's Notting Hill neighborhood. Although the film disappeared at the box office, it did earn Boorman the Best Direction award at Cannes.Deliverance, Boorman's 1972 follow-up to Leo the Last, was as successful as its predecessor had been overlooked. A nightmarish meditation on the inefficacy of social constructs and civilized niceties in the face of primal squalor, the film was hailed for its depictions of the dark realities of human nature and oppressive machismo. Nominated for three Oscars, including one for Best Director, the film quickly became a classic, with its scenes involving a banjo duel with an inbred Appalachian child and Ned Beatty's rape by a pair of backwoods rednecks recognized as some of cinema's most memorable.Boorman's next two projects, the Sean Connery vehicle Zardoz (1973) and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), were unquestionable disappointments that dimmed the director's post-Deliverance glow. He rebounded with Excalibur (1981), a brutal, visually-lavish adaptation of Malory's Morte d'Arthur. The film enjoyed a warm critical and commercial reception and earned a number of honors, including a Golden Palm nomination for Boorman at Cannes. Following the success of Excalibur, Boorman did not direct again until 1985, when he helmed The Emerald Forest. The story of a man's tireless search for his son, who disappeared into the Amazon rain forest when he was seven, it starred Boorman's son Charley as the grown boy, who had been raised by a tribe of Amazon Indians. Despite earning high marks for its ravishing scenery, the film was a notable flop, with some critics complaining that Boorman sacrificed narrative strength in favor of impressive visuals.With Hope and Glory (1987), Boorman regained any critical standing he might have lost with The Emerald Forest. The surprisingly gentle, semi-autobiographical account of a boy's experiences during the London Blitz, it was Boorman's least pessimistic film to date, and was hailed for its unforced exuberance. He followed it with Where the Heart Is (1990), a comedy that proved to be a critical and commercial nonentity, and I Dreamt I Woke Up (1991), a critically acclaimed short film that recounted the highs and lows of Boorman's career.Following the short Two Nudes Bathing and the relatively disappointing Beyond Rangoon (both 1995), Boorman resurfaced in 1998 with The General. The story of legendary, real-life Irish crime lord Martin Cahill, it featured an extraordinary performance by Brendan Gleeson in the title role, and it was hailed as Boorman's best film in years. The director -- who had his own real-life encounter with Cahill when the latter robbed his house years earlier -- won the Best Direction award at Cannes for his work, almost 30 years after winning the same award for Leo the Last.

Trivia: Bruce MacLeish Dern is the scion of a distinguished family of politicians and men of letters that includes his uncle, the distinguished poet/playwright Archibald MacLeish. After a prestigious education at New Trier High and Choate Preparatory, Dern enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, only to drop out abruptly in favor of Lee Strasberg's Actors' Studio. With his phlegmatic voice and schoolyard-bully countenance, he was not considered a likely candidate for stardom, and was often treated derisively by his fellow students. In 1958, he made his first Broadway appearance in A Touch of the Poet. Two years later, he was hired by director Elia Kazan to play a bit role in the 20th Century Fox production Wild River. He was a bit more prominent on TV, appearing regularly as E.J. Stocker in the contemporary Western series Stoney Burke. A favorite of Alfred Hitchcock, Dern was prominently cast in a handful of the director's TV-anthology episodes, and as the unfortunate sailor in the flashback sequences of the feature film Marnie (1964). During this period, Dern played as many victims as victimizers; he was just as memorable being hacked to death by Victor Buono in Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1965) as he was while attempting to rape Linda Evans on TV's The Big Valley. Through the auspices of his close friend Jack Nicholson, Dern showed up in several Roger Corman productions of the mid-'60s, reaching a high point as Peter Fonda's "guide" through LSD-land in The Trip (1967). The actor's ever-increasing fan following amongst disenfranchised younger filmgoers shot up dramatically when he gunned down Establishment icon John Wayne in The Cowboys (1971). After scoring a critical hit with his supporting part in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), Dern began attaining leading roles in such films as Silent Running (1971), The King of Marvin Gardens (1972), The Great Gatsby (1974), and Smile (1975). In 1976, he returned to the Hitchcock fold, this time with top billing, in Family Plot. Previously honored with a National Society of Film Critics award for his work in the Jack Nicholson-directed Drive, He Said (1970), Dern received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal of an unhinged Vietnam veteran in Coming Home (1978), in which he co-starred with one-time Actors' Studio colleague (and former classroom tormentor) Jane Fonda. He followed this triumph with a return to Broadway in the 1979 production Strangers. In 1982, Dern won the Berlin Film Festival Best Actor prize for That Championship Season. He then devoted several years to stage and TV work, returning to features in the strenuous role of a middle-aged long distance runner in On the Edge (1986).After a humorous turn in the 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The 'Burbs, Dern dropped beneath the radar for much of the '90s. He would appear in cult favorites like Mulholland Falls and the Walter Hill Yojimbo re-make Last Man Standing (both 1996), as well as The Haunting (1999) and All the Pretty Horses (2000). As the 2000's unfolded, Dern would continue to act, apperaing most notably in film like Monster and Django Unchained.Formerly married to actress Diane Ladd, Bruce Dern is the father of actress Laura Dern.

Trivia: Though Piers Morgan's early career was spent contributing to various journalistic endeavors in British tabloid media -- he was the editor for both The Daily World and News of the World -- he is perhaps best known for his role as a judge along with fellow Britons Simon Cowell and Amanda Holden on Britain's Got Talent. Morgan appeared as a celebrity contestant on Comic Relief Does The Apprentice in 2007; in 2008 he would reprise this "role" for NBC's celebrity edition of The Apprentice with Donald Trump. In 2006 he became one of the three judges on America's Got Talent, and in 2010 he left that program to take over Larry King's CNN interview program when the venerable TV personality retired.

Trivia: Charming, handsome, and easy-going, lead actor and megastar Burt Reynolds entered the world on February 11, 1936. He attended Florida State University on a football scholarship, and became an all-star Southern Conference halfback, but - faced with a knee injury and a debilitating car accident - switched gears from athletics to college drama. In 1955, he dropped out of college and traveled to New York, in search of stage work, but only turned up occasional bit parts on television, and for two years he had to support himself as a dishwasher and bouncer.In 1957, Reynolds's ship came in when he appeared in a New York City Center revival of Mister Roberts; shortly thereafter, he signed a television contract. He sustained regular roles in the series Riverboat, Gunsmoke, Hawk, and Dan August. Although he appeared in numerous films in the 1960s, he failed to make a significant impression. In the early '70s, his popularity began to increase, in part due to his witty appearances on daytime TV talk shows. His breakthrough film, Deliverance (1972), established him as both a screen icon and formidable actor. That same year, Reynolds became a major sex symbol when he posed as the first nude male centerfold in the April edition of Cosmopolitan. He went on to become the biggest box-office attraction in America for several years - the centerpiece of films such as Hustle (1975), Smokey and the Bandit (1977) (as well as its two sequels), The End (1978), Starting Over (1979), The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), and The Man Who Loved Women (1983). However, by the mid-'80s, his heyday ended, largely thanks to his propensity for making dumb-dumb bumper-smashing road comedies with guy pals such as Hal Needham (Stroker Ace, The Cannonball Run 2). Reynolds's later cinematic efforts (such as the dismal Malone (1987)) failed to generate any box office sizzle, aside from a sweet and low-key turn as an aging career criminal in Bill Forsyth's Breaking In (1989). Taking this as a cue, Reynolds transitioned to the small screen, and starred in the popular sitcom Evening Shade, for which he won an Emmy. He also directed several films, created the hit Win, Lose or Draw game show with friend Bert Convy, and established the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theater in Florida. In the mid-'90s, Reynolds ignited a comeback that began with his role as a drunken, right-wing congressman in Andrew Bergman's Striptease (1996). Although the film itself suffered from critical pans and bombed out at the box office, the actor won raves for his performance, with many critics citing his comic interpretation of the role as one of the film's key strengths. His luck continued the following year, when Paul Thomas Anderson cast him as porn director Jack Horner in his acclaimed Boogie Nights. Reynolds would go on to earn a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, and between the twin triumphs of Striptease and Nights, critics read the resurgence as the beginning of a second wind in the Deliverance star's career, ala John Travolta's turnaround in 1994's Pulp Fiction. But all was not completely well chez Burt. A nasty conflict marred his interaction with Paul Thomas Anderson just prior to the release of Boogie Nights. It began with Reynolds's disastrous private screening of Nights; he purportedly loathed the picture so much that he phoned his agent after the screening and fired him. When the Anderson film hit cinemas and became a success d'estime, Reynolds rewrote his opinion of the film and agreed to follow Anderson on a tour endorsing the effort, but Reynolds understandably grew peeved when Anderson refused to let him speak publicly. Reynolds grew so infuriated, in fact, that he refused to play a role in Anderson's tertiary cinematic effort, 1999's Magnolia. Reynolds's went on to appear in a big screen adatpation of The Dukes of Hazzard as Boss Hogg, and later returned to drama with a supporting performance in the musical drama Broken Bridges; a low-key tale of a fading country music star that served as a feature debut for real-life country music singer Toby Kieth. Over the coming years, Reynolds would also enjoy occasional appearances on shows like My Name is Earl and Burn Notice.