Trivia: Born in the Bronx, NY, to an upper-middle-class Irish family, Carroll O'Connor's father was a well-connected attorney and his mother was a school teacher. The family lived well, in the Forest Hills section of Queens, until O'Connor's father ran afoul of the law and was convicted of fraud. Despite this setback in the family's well-being, O'Connor managed to attend college and considered a career as a sportswriter, but those aspirations were interrupted by the outbreak of World War II. Rejected by the United States Navy, he enrolled instead in the Merchant Marine Academy, but he later abandoned that pursuit, instead becoming a merchant seaman. After the war, O'Connor considered journalism as a career, but a trip to Dublin in 1950 changed the course of his life, as he discovered the acting profession. While attending college in Dublin, he began appearing in productions of the Gate Theater and also at the Edinburgh Festival, where he played Shakespearean roles. Returning to New York in 1954, he and his wife worked as substitute schoolteachers while he looked for acting work, which he found, after a long dry spell in which he despaired of ever getting a break, in Burgess Meredith's production of James Joyce's Ulysses. O'Connor got a role in which he received favorable notice from the critics, and that, in turn, led to his breakthrough part, as a bullying, greedy studio boss in an off-Broadway production of The Big Knife. O'Connor jumped next to television, at the very tail-end of the era of live TV drama in New York. Beginning in 1960 with his portrayal of the prosecutor in the Armstrong Circle Theater production of The Sacco-Vanzetti Story, he established himself on the small screen as a good, reliable character actor, who was able to melt into any role with which he was presented. Over the next decade, O'Connor worked in everything from Westerns to science fiction. He played taciturn landowners, likable aliens, enemy agents (on The Man From U.N.C.L.E., in "The Green Opal Affair"), and other character roles with equal aplomb. He also appeared in several unsold television pilots during the 1960s, including The Insider with David Janssen, and Luxury Liner starring Rory Calhoun, playing character roles; and he did a pilot of his own, Walk in the Night -- directed and co-written by Robert Altman -- in which he co-starred with Andrew Duggan. O'Connor's movie career followed quickly from his television debut, starting with appearances in three dramatic films (most notably Lonely Are the Brave) in 1961. He was one of many actors who managed to get "lost" in the sprawling 20th Century Fox production of Cleopatra, but he fared better two years later in Otto Preminger's epic-length World War II drama In Harm's Way. O'Connor, playing Commander Burke, was very visible in his handful of scenes with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, and Preminger thought enough of the actor to mention him by name along with the other stars in the film's trailer. He had major supporting roles, serious and comedic, respectively, in such high-profile movies as Hawaii and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?, of which the latter proved critical to his subsequent career. O'Connor had been in demand for television roles since the early '60s. In an episode of The Outer Limits, he revealed his flexibility by playing a somewhat befuddled alien investigator from Mars, masquerading as a pawnshop owner in a seedy section of New York, and jumping from a slightly affected, carefully pronounced diction in one line to a working-class dialect and manner in the same shot (for benefit of a human onlooker in the scene). He had also given a very warm, memorable, and touching performance in "Long Live the King," an episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and producer Irwin Allen had wanted O'Connor for the role of Dr. Smith on Lost in Space early in the character's conception, when the Smith figure was thoroughly villainous. Although he didn't get the part of Dr. Smith, O'Connor later appeared in "The Lost Patrol" episode of Allen's science fiction series The Time Tunnel. He had also been up for the role of the Skipper in Sherwood Schwartz's series Gilligan's Island, a role that was finally won by Alan Hale Jr. At the end of the 1960s, while O'Connor was busying himself in movies ranging from Westerns to crime films and mysteries, including Warning Shot, Waterhole No. 3, Marlowe, and For Love of Ivy, and distinguishing himself in all of them, CBS began preparing a television series called Those Were the Days. Adapted from a British series, it dealt life from the point-of-view of Archie Bunker, a fed-up, bigoted working-class resident of New York's outer borough of Queens. The network had tried for a big name, approaching Mickey Rooney to play the part, but he turned it down, and then co-producer Bud Yorkin remembered O'Connor's blustery comic performance as General Bolt in What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? O'Connor was offered the role and accepted. He was as busy as ever with movie work, including his portrayal of a memorably boisterous and comical general in Kelly's Heroes, which was shot in Europe in 1970, and the series -- now called All in the Family -- didn't seem a likely or essential prospect for success. Within weeks of All in the Family's premiere in January of 1971, however, O'Connor had become one of the most recognizable and popular leading men on television. O'Connor had never played more than major supporting roles in movies, so there were no feature films to license starring the new pop culture hero; but CBS did pull Walk in the Night, the unsold pilot from three years earlier, starring O'Connor as a detective in a race against time to save a man's life, and aired it with the kind of fanfare normally reserved for major feature films. From 1971 on, O'Connor never looked back: He got star billing the next year in the network television production Of Thee I Sing (1972), and got his first chance to star in a feature film in Law and Disorder, in 1974. O'Connor would play nothing but leads from then on, and command a leading man's salary, a matter that led to a contractual dispute in 1974 that resulted in the actor absenting himself from All in the Family for a series of shows before it was resolved. From then on, entire productions, such as the TV-movie adaptation of The Last Hurrah (1977), would be built around him. He also returned to the theater periodically with far less success, starring in and directing a handful of theatrical productions that seldom got good notices or lingered long on-stage. O'Connor earned four Emmy awards as Archie Bunker, a recognition of the convincing mixture of warmth and anger that he brought to the character, and such was his popularity in the role, that he was able to parlay it into a spin-off series for four seasons called Archie Bunker's Place. It seemed for a time in the 1980s that O'Connor would be forever locked into the role, until 1987 when he got the part of laconic small-town Southern police chief Bill Gillespie in the television series In the Heat of the Night. Taking over a part originated on screen by Rod Steiger, O'Connor rebuilt the character from the ground up, making Gillespie a strong-willed, yet soft-spoken, flawed, sometimes crude, even occasionally bigoted man who was learning to be better. His work in the series earned O'Connor an additional Emmy, and he eventually took over control of the production, transforming In the Heat of the Night from a routine cop show into one of the better dramatic series of its era, with police work only incidental to its content (and hardly a car chase in sight), in a run lasting through 1994.

Trivia: Alan Autry is best known by television audiences for his portrayal of police officer Bubba Skinner on the series In the Heat of the Night. Born Carlos Brown in Shreveport, LA, he was raised in Riverdale, CA, and became a star athlete and football player at the University of the Pacific in Stockton. He was drafted by the Green Bay Packers in 1975 and spent two years as a second string quarterback for the team. In 1978, he joined the British Columbia Lions in the Canadian Football League, and that same year he made his acting debut (as Carlos Brown) in Remember My Name. In 1979, he appeared in a small role in North Dallas Forty, and he portrayed Slug in Popeye (1980). Still working under his given name, he appeared in series such as Best of the West, and he was first noticed in a serious way in movies in 1982, with his portrayal of Bowden, one of the doomed National Guardsmen, in Southern Comfort. By 1983, he was working as Alan Autry, and got guest roles in series such as The A-Team and Cheers. Finally, in 1988, Autry was chosen for the role of Sergeant (later Captain) Bubba Skinner in the series In the Heat of the Night -- his good looks, deep voice, and complex character, as a white Southerner who takes some time to get accustomed to the working methods of a black police detective (portrayed by Howard E. Rollins) from up north, made him stand out in the part, and Autry became one of the key members of the ensemble cast. Autry continued acting regularly after In the Heat of the Night concluded its run in the 1990s, until 2000, when he ran successfully for Mayor of Fresno, CA, and was elected to a four-year term, thus joining Clint Eastwood, Sonny Bono, Fred Thompson and Ronald Reagan in the ranks of actors elected to political office.

Trivia: To the public at large, Jerry Stiller is best known as the husband and comedy partner of actress/director Anne Meara, and as the father of comedian Ben Stiller. For those addicted to the NBC sitcom Seinfeld, Stiller will never be anyone else than Frank Costanza, the eternally kvetching father of born-loser George Costanza (Jason Alexander). While Stiller would be the first to welcome recognition on these terms, to acknowledge him for the above-mentioned reasons alone would be grossly unfair. A stage performer from the age of 10, Stiller majored in drama at the University of Syracuse, then took to the road in a touring company of Peter Pan. Honing his comic timing to perfection under the tutelage of revue director Billy Barnes, Stiller chose to concentrate his laughmaking skills in the Classics, specifically Shakespeare. He made his off-Broadway debut in a 1953 production of Coriolanus, and subsequently paid homage to the Bard of Avon as a member of such prestigious troupes as the Stratford (Connecticut) Shakespeare Festival and Joseph Papp's Shakespeare in the Park. Stiller made his Broadway bow in 1975 as ill-tempered gangster Carmine Vespucci in Terence McNally's The Ritz, a part he recreated in the 1976 film version. Among his many other film credits are Lovers and Other Strangers (1970), Hairspray (1988) and the made-for-television Seize the Day (1987). The actor's series-TV resumé includes the roles of Barney Dickerson in The Paul Lynde Show (1972), Gus Duzik in Joe and Sons (1975) and Sid Wilbur in Tattinger's (1988). He also co-starred with wife Anne Meara in the syndicated Take Five with Stiller and Meara (1977), and provided voiceovers for the animated Linus the Lionhearted (1964) and the multipart Ken Burns TV special Baseball (1994). Jerry Stiller has been honored with the Radio Advertising Bureau's Voice of Imagery Award for his persuasive radio and TV spots on behalf of the Public Broadcasting System.Notable later roles included an extended run on the hit TV series The King of Queens starting in 1998, as well as appearances in son Ben's 2001 male model comedy Zoolander, and the 2007 musical Hairspray. In 2000 Stiller received a Grammy nomination for Best Spoken Word Album for the audio version of his autobiographical book "Married to Laughter: A Love Story Featuring Anne Meara." Stiller and Meara received a joint star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007, and three years later, Stiller and his wife launched the YahooWeb series Stiller & Meara, in which the pair discuss current events from their living room, which ran until Meara's death in 2015. Their son, Ben, produced the segments.

Trivia: A football star at San Diego State, Carl Weathers played professionally with the Oakland Raiders, acting in local stage productions during the off-season. Weathers went on to play with the British Columbia Lions in the Canadian Football League, then retired from sports in 1974, the better to devote all his time to an acting career. After yeoman service in a handful of "blaxploitation" flicks, he rose to fame as the Muhammad Ali-inspired Apollo Creed in the first Rocky film. Apollo Creed's adversarial relationship with Rocky Balboa mellowed into warm friendship in the course of the next three Rocky installments; indeed, when Apollo was killed off by "superboxer" Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV (1985), the tragedy served as the motivation for the retired Rocky to climb into the ring yet once more. Weathers' post-Rocky projects have included the title role in Action Jackson (1988), the Sidney Poitier part in the 1985 TV-movie remake of The Defiant Ones, and the TV series Fortune Dane, Street Justice and Tour of Duty. In the early 1990s, Weathers replaced Howard Rollins Jr. in a group of In the Heat of the Night 2-hour TV specials. He developed a knack for comedy later in his career, appearing in Happy Gilmore, Little Nicky, and making a particularly memorable cameo in the sitcom Arrested Development as a stew-obsessed acting coach. In addition to his show business work, Carl Weathers has been active with the Big Brothers Association and the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Trivia: Supporting actor Hugh O'Connor was best-known for playing the role of Corporal Lonnie Jamison opposite his father Carroll O'Connor on the television series In the Heat of the Night; he also appeared in a few feature films, but though O'Connor wanted to be an actor like his father, his difficulties with drug and alcohol addiction made it impossible for him to advance his career. Born in Rome, Italy, he was adopted by Carroll and Nancy O'Connor when he was six days old. Naming him Hugh Edward Ralph O'Connor, they raised him in Southern California where his father struggled to establish an acting career. The senior O'Connor succeeded when he was cast as Archie Bunker on Norman Lear's controversial, innovative sitcom All in the Family. The show was a hit and the family fortunes greatly improved, thereby providing Hugh O'Connor with a pleasant and privileged childhood. His problems with drugs began at age 16 after he was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma, a sometimes fatal form of cancer. Following two operations and daily chemotherapy, O'Connor dulled his pain with prescription drugs and marijuana, which he used to control nausea. The use of harder drugs followed and despite the efforts of his loving family, numerous arrests, and many weeks in various drug rehab centers, O'Connor could only manage to kick his habits for a few months at a time. During those sober times, he proved himself a gifted actor with great potential. After joining the cast of In the Heat of the Night, he remained sober and drug-free until the show's cancellation in 1994. His renewed drinking and drugging led his wife and newborn son to leave. On March 28, 1995, the deeply depressed Hugh O'Connor disregarded his father's pleas and the attempts of police surrounding his home to talk with him and shot himself.

Trivia: Marc Macaulay is an actor who's just got one of those faces -- you know you've seen it somewhere before but you just can't seem to put your finger on it. Of course, one glance at the screen veteran's credit list and movie fanatics will instantly realize that they have indeed seen Macaulay numerous times on screens both large and small, it's just that he has a way of immersing himself in the role so effectively that it's difficult to distinguish which performance stood out the most. It was during his junior year of college that the aspiring commercial illustrator accepted a dare to audition for an upcoming play, yet while the friend who issued that challenge was well on his way to becoming a professional actor, Macaulay himself had never even considered a career in the performing arts. When the cast list was posted and Macaulay discovered that he had landed one of the lead roles, however, the course of his entire life would suddenly be altered by the decision of one single casting director. After receiving a scholarship for acting and graduating with a BFA in theater, Macaulay relocated to Jupiter, FL, in order to attend the Burt Reynolds Institute of Theatre Training. While a move to New York seemed only natural for Macaulay upon finishing his training in Florida, acting gigs in the Big Apple were few and far between. After racking up a few film credits and continuing his studies at H.B. Studios, Macaulay eventually returned to the Sunshine State to audition for a new series called Miami Vice (1984). Over the course of the following decade, Macaulay was swept up in a whirlwind of supporting roles. From short-lived series like B.L. Stryker and Wiseguy to major motion pictures such as Edward Scissorhands, Passenger 57, Contact, and The Truman Show, the workman-like actor could always be counted on to deliver a convincing, well-mannered performance. While frequent roles in such shows as Matlock, Walker, Texas Ranger, and Nash Bridges provided a bit of stability in a notoriously volatile industry, the increasingly busy actor largely earned his keep by continually leaping from the big screen to the small -- all the while displaying impressive footing on both. By the year 2000, casting directors were finally wising up to the true talent at their disposal, and Macaulay was landing consistent work in feature films. Never tied to just one genre, Macaulay turned in impressive performances in films as diverse as From Justin to Kelly, Monster, Transporter 2, and The Hawk Is Dying (opposite Academy Award-nominee Paul Giamatti). A minor role in the 2006 feature film Miami Vice served well to bring Macaulay's career full circle. In 2006, Macaulay could be seen in a recurring role on the popular Fox drama Prison Break, with subsequent parts in the feature films Premonition and Walking Tall 2 preceding yet another small-screen recurring role in the weekly USA Network thriller Burn Notice in 2007.

Trivia: A graduate of the University of Michigan, actress Denise Nicholas made her first off-Broadway appearance in the 1966 revue Viet Rock. She later appeared in such New York productions as Ceremonies in Dark Old Men and Dame Lorraine, and was active with the Free Southern Theater and the Negro Ensemble Company. She co-starred with Bill Cosby in a number of films, including Let's Do It Again (1975), A Piece of the Action (1977), and Ghost Dad (1990). Nicholas was been a regular on three TV series, playing guidance counselor Liz McIntyre in Room 222 (1969-1974), for which she received three Golden Globe nominations; Olivia Ellis in Baby, I'm Back (1978); and Harriet De Long in In the Heat of the Night (1988-1994). She later starred as an alcoholic mother in domestic drama Ritual (2000). Nicholas is also author of The Denise Nicholas Beauty Book.