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: Supporting actor Becker first appeared onscreen as a juvenile in the '70s.

Trivia: American actor Cliff DeYoung began a stop-and-start film career with Pilgrimage in 1972; most of his work for the next several years was on stage and in television. DeYoung starred in the very brief 1975 TV series Sunshine, playing a widowed musician raising a young stepdaughter; the series was a spin-off of the 1973 TV movie of the same name, which also starred DeYoung. The actor also played the lead role of a blinded Vietnam vet in the Joseph Papp-produced CBS drama special Sticks and Bones (1973) which was blacked out by many affiliates due to its vitriolic antiwar stance. Three years later, DeYoung played Charles Lindbergh (to whom he bore a daunting resemblance) in the 1976 made-for-TV Lindbergh Kidnapping Case. After his attention-grabbing appearance in the 1983 horror film The Hunger, Cliff DeYoung concentrated on movie roles, with occasional returns to TV in such productions as the 1985 miniseries Robert Kennedy and His Times.

Trivia: African-American actor/director Georg Stanford Brown was seven-years-old when his family moved from Havana to Harlem. Chronically absent during his high school years, Brown was invited to drop out by his frustrated teachers. At 15, he organized a singing group called the Parthenons, which broke up after a single network TV appearance. He moved to Los Angeles at 17, where, after passing the college entrance exam, he enrolled in the L.A. City College theater program. "I just wanted to take something easy," he explained later, "but after a while I really got to like it." He liked it well enough to study further at New York's American Musical and Dramatic Academy. Making his professional stage debut in Joseph Papp's Central Park Shakespearean productions, Brown headed back to L.A., certain that his theatrical credits would assure him steady work in films and TV, which they did, though at a molasses-slow pace. After increasingly larger roles in such films as The Comedians (1967), Bullitt (1968), and Colossus: The Forbin Project (1971), Brown was cast as officer Terry Webster on the Aaron Spelling-produced TV series The Rookies, which ran from 1972 to 1976. After Rookies, Brown began curtailing his acting in favor of directing. He helmed several episodes of TV's Hill Street Blues, as well as such made-for-TV movies as Grambling's White Tiger (1981), Miracle of the Heart: A Boys' Town Story (1986), Stuck With Each Other (1989), Father and Son: Dangerous Relations (1992), and The Last POW: The Bobby Garwood Story (1993). In 1986, Georg Stanford Brown won an Emmy for his direction of the Cagney and Lacey episode "Parting Shots," which starred his then-wife Tyne Daly.

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: 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: 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: Lead actor, onscreen from 1985.

Trivia: Actor Barry Corbin may be best remembered for portraying Maurice Minnifield, the blustery but good-hearted ex-astronaut and entrepreneurial owner of Cicely, Alaska, in the popular TV show Northern Exposure (1990-95). Prior to that, he worked steadily on stage, screen and television since the mid '70s. With his stocky build and big voice, the Texas native is noted for his portrayals of policemen, soldiers, and father figures. He received formal training in theater at Texas Tech, and, after spending two years in the Marines, Corbin returned home and began acting in regional theater. He later went to New York where he worked on and off Broadway. He moved to L.A. in 1977 where he began writing radio plays for National Public Radio. In 1980 Corbin began his feature-film career, appearing in three popular films: Any Which Way You Can, Stir Crazy, and Urban Cowboy. Among his other early career highlights are Six Pack, Honkytonk Man, and playing General Beringer in John Badham's nuclear thriller WarGames. He continued to work steadily in TV and film in projects such as LBJ: The Early Years, Nothing In Common, Critters 2, and Who's Harry Crumb before landing his iconic part on Northern Exposure.After the quirky CBS series ended, he could be seen in Curdled, The Drew Carey Show, and in a recurring role on the drama series One Tree Hill. In 2007 he was in the Best Picture winning No Country For Old Men. His most recent credits include Feed he Fish, and Valley of the Sun.